


Technical Difficulties

by Cici_Nota



Series: In Which A Series Of Poor Decisions Leads To Consequences [3]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-09 07:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 32,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cici_Nota/pseuds/Cici_Nota
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Lost Light heads off to investigate a lead from an incredibly unreliable source, ending in total disaster. Except that it hasn't ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This follows From Beneath Us, It Devours. Reading that story is not, however, necessary to read this one.

The briefcase sent chills down Ratchet’s spinal strut every time he saw it casually dangling from Brainstorm’s hand.  Not seeing it wasn’t much better, because that meant it was just sitting around unattended. Some idiot could potentially open it and cause a disaster, and the Lost Light was full of idiots who acted first and thought later. A prime example of said idiocy had just left the medibay; Powerglide and Highbrow had attempted an aerial obstacle course competition with rather predicable results, the tail end of a long and rather trying day.

“If either of you pulls a stunt like this again, I’m not going to help you find all the missing pieces,” Ratchet had told both of them. Neither of them had looked appropriately chastised, probably because Rodimus had been more amused than upset at the whole incident and there had been talk of setting up some actual obstacle courses the next time a suitable planet showed up in their general vicinity.  It was rather a pity, Ratchet had been thinking, that Ultra Magnus wasn’t currently on board – performing reconnaissance had taken him out of comm range – to terrify the crew into not actively destroying their own ship, and then Brainstorm had walked past the medibay with something in one hand.

The first thought that crossed Ratchet’s mind was that the object hanging loosely from Brainstorm’s relaxed grip wasn’t the infamous briefcase.  The second was that the footsteps from down the corridor were rapidly getting louder, which generally heralded disaster. The third thought was interrupted before it had a chance to form by Rodimus running full-tilt around the corner and crashing into Brainstorm.

If Ratchet had had Blurr’s speed, he might have been able to avoid the resulting collision.  As it was, three Autobots went down in a tangled heap, Ratchet cursing the entire way as whatever was in Brainstorm’s hand scored a gash down his side.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Rodimus managed to extricate himself gracefully, disentangling Brainstorm and Ratchet while he did so. “Uh, are you guys okay?”

Brainstorm, in the process of gathering up the scattered pieces of his project, gave Rodimus a scathing look.  “ _I’m_ fine,” he said. “But-“

“Oh, good.” Rodimus nodded. “Ratchet, I have a question.”

Ratchet extracted a shard of something from his skin and handed it to Brainstorm along with the bits that had gotten stuck underneath him. Brainstorm gave him a long-suffering sigh and Ratchet shrugged apologetically. Rodimus chose that moment to notice that he’d broken something.

“Was that the-“ he started.

“No,” Brainstorm said. “I’m going to need additional resources to repair it, however.”

Ratchet used the ensuing debate on limited supplies to escape whatever Rodimus’ question was.  First Aid was on shift in the medibay – he was perfectly capable of answering anything at this point, and Ratchet’s patience and energy reserves were too low to carry on a conversation without snapping. Fortunately for his peace of mind, Rodimus failed to notice that he was sneaking away until after he was out of earshot. Also fortunately for his peace of mind, Ratchet walked past Ultra Magnus apparently returning from his mission in pristine shape.  He nodded at the SiC and received a quiet nod in return.

“Hey, do you have a minute?”

The question came as Ratchet was less than thirty seconds from the door of his quarters.  “What can I do for you, Drift?” he asked, trying not to radiate a desire for the other mech to just _go away_. The ship seemed to be mirroring his irritation; Ratchet was abnormally aware of the ever-present vibration in the deck plates as the ship hurled itself through space.

Drift stared at him for a moment, expression unreadable. “Uh, never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow.” His hand twitched in an abortive gesture, as if he’d been about to reach out physically and changed his mind at the last second, and then he gave Ratchet a tight half-smile before walking stiffly away.

Ratchet resisted the urge to slam his head against the corridor wall in frustration in favor of getting inside his hab suite and locking the door before any other aggravating encounters could find him. Half an emergency energon cube later, he stretched out on his recharge slab with a sense of profound relief.

The following morning found Ratchet back in the medibay, examining the cut down his side. It hadn’t led to any significant fluid loss, and nanites had already covered the damaged areas. It did pull slightly when he moved his torso just so, but the pain was manageable. His self-repair systems would take care of it, he decided.

“Anything catastrophic happen overnight?” he asked First Aid.

“Define catastrophic,” First Aid said, and Ratchet immediately focused his full attention on his Chief Medical Officer In Training.

“What happened?” he asked, his own minor injury completely forgotten.

“Nothing, nothing, that was a joke,” First Aid said, hands up defensively.

“Huh,” Ratchet said, eying him. “It was a quiet night, then.”

“Quiet as a mausoleum,” First Aid said, which was when Ratchet heard the sound of an explosion. “I jinxed us,” First Aid said ruefully, but Ratchet was already on the comm.

 _No, no, everything is fine,_ came the response from Powerflash. _Uh, scratch that, one incoming casualty._

 _Details,_ Ratchet snapped, but apparently the casualty was capable of making it to the medibay on his own and no emergency response was required.

The casualty turned out to be Perceptor, stalking through the door carrying his own arm and looking extremely annoyed about it. Shrapnel studded his chest, although the tough plating he’d installed on himself after the sniper incident hadn’t been pierced.

“What happened?” Ratchet asked, deactivating the sensory circuits in the area in preparation for reattaching the limb.  Perceptor relaxed almost imperceptibly as he lost feeling in the damaged area.

“Smokescreen,” he said grimly, and Ratchet nodded. The intelligence specialist, along with a number of other crew members, had been temporarily restricted to light duty after the Lost Light’s recent encounter with a rust plague.  Smokescreen hadn’t taken to boredom well.

“Did he-“ Ratchet started.

“My lab is a disaster,” Perceptor said, with a distinct air of I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it. 

“If you need a hand putting it back together…” Ratchet offered.

“Thanks, but no.”

The rest of the repairs followed in silence, with Perceptor flexing his newly repaired limb afterwards.  Small gashes scored his chestplate, but he’d refused immediate repairs.

“There are at least two deep enough to fester if left untreated,” Ratchet told him.

“I need to oversee repair work,” Perceptor said, by which Ratchet assumed he meant throw everyone out of his workspace and conduct the repairs himself.

Knowing when to pick his battles had never been one of Ratchet’s strong points, but he could tell he wasn’t going to win this one. “I want you to return before you recharge,” he said, offering a compromise.

Perceptor considered for all of four seconds before agreeing, which left Ratchet with a functionally empty medibay and an examining table decorated with drying energon. The only sounds were the soft beeps of the monitors attached to the offliners and the whirring of the ventilation fans. Ratchet considered making a bet with himself as to how long the relative silence would persist before deciding he’d lose either way, and went off to check the offliners and Sunstreaker again; it was always possible someone’s condition would improve, after all.

Sunstreaker wasn’t actually in the medibay; he was the only crew member actually still on light duty after the rust plague incident, but Ratchet commed him with a list of questions – the actual physical exam was scheduled for the following day. Since they were the same questions Sunstreaker had answered for the past six days running, he was rather irritable through the whole exchange. Ratchet ignored the prickly tone and closed the comm without further remark.

None of the offliners had gotten worse, although Ratchet wouldn’t have wagered on any of them waking any time soon.  He’d just finished the end of the row when the medibay door slid open again, this time to admit Drift.

“What did you do?” Ratchet asked, looking him over for obvious signs of injury. There weren’t any.

“Do? Nothing,” Drift said, with the same tentative expression he’d had ever since the Metrotitan and its accompanying rust plague. “I, uh.” His vocal processor appeared to stall out.

“Yes?” Ratchet said, moving away from the row of offliners.

“We’ve got a new lead,” Drift said suddenly.  “On the Knights.”

“That’s good news, isn’t it?” Ratchet said.  “But why are you telling me-“

“I wanted to let you know before Rodimus does the shipwide announcement,” Drift interrupted. “We’re headed into a new sector, and I thought you might like the heads-up in case we run into something unexpected.”

“You say that like it’s not already cast in stone,” Ratchet grumbled. It didn’t matter _where_ they went, he was going to end up with casualties in the medibay.

“Are you suggesting some things are pre-ordained?” Drift needled, a note of good-natured teasing in his voice that had been missing for weeks.

“I’m just expressing the near total probability, with Rodimus at the helm, of explosions in our near future,” Ratchet retorted. “Don’t give me that look, Drift, you know he leaps before he looks.”

“But we’ve got Ultra Magnus,” Drift said, the teasing note growing stronger. “The anti-trouble magnet.”

“Please.” Ratchet snorted. “If Ultra Magnus were an anti-trouble magnet, we wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. Besides,” he added. “I’m going to guess that whatever lead we have is flimsy and unsubstantiated, and he tried to talk Rodimus out of following it, and Rodimus is dragging us all anyway.”

Drift’s silence was telling.

“Still,” Ratchet continued, after he felt his point had been made. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to prepare for the potential catastrophe.”

“I wouldn’t say _catastrophe_ ,” Drift said, smiling. Ratchet couldn’t help smiling back, and when Drift’s smile developed into a low chuckle, Ratchet laughed with him.

“In all seriousness,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Drift said, and turned as if to leave.  Instead of moving toward the door, as Ratchet had quite reasonably expected, he paused and then turned back, avoiding Ratchet’s gaze.

“What else do you need?” Ratchet asked after a moment, when it became clear that Drift wasn’t going to speak without some sort of encouragement. “Is this about yesterday?” he said, the memory of their brief encounter suddenly surfacing.

“Yesterday?” Drift twitched.  If Ratchet hadn’t known better, he would have called it a flinch, and he felt a sudden suspicion that Drift was hiding something important. “What about yesterday?”

The defensive tone in Drift’s voice wasn’t helping his case any. “You stopped me in the corridor and asked if I had a minute,” Ratchet said.

“Oh. Right. Yes.” Drift didn’t seem to have any expansion on his rather monosyllabic answer; trying to get information out of him was starting to feel like pulling nuts and bolts out of an endoskeleton – difficult and possibly not worth the trouble. But Drift was a friend, and he was apparently upset over something.

“What about yesterday?” Ratchet prompted.

“I, uh,” Drift repeated, still looking everywhere but at Ratchet, and stopped talking again.

“Just tell me!” Ratchet said, a little more of an edge to his voice than he’d intended.  Some of the frustration from the previous day had carried over, apparently. He softened his delivery and continued. “Whatever it is, I can help.”

“It’s you,” Drift said, finally raising his optics to Ratchet’s face.

“It’s what?” Ratchet couldn’t help the startled vocalization, what with Drift now staring at him as if nothing else existed, and then he couldn’t do anything but listen.

“You… you’re important to me,” Drift said, slowly at first and then faster, until the words were tumbling out almost more quickly than his tongue could handle. “I mean, of course, you’re my friend, but you mean more to me than that and – and I don’t know what I would have been without you, no, I do know, I would have been dead twice over, but the first time at least there are so many that still would be – that’s not what I mean, that’s not what I came here to say, I want you to know what you mean to me.”

He paused just long enough for Ratchet to open his mouth before cutting off any sort of response with a final rush of rapid words.

“You mean more to me than just a friend. I respect you, and I like you, and it’s so much more than that, and I wanted you to know. I want to be with you, now and… and tomorrow. Every tomorrow I have. That we have. And, um, I’ll understand if you don’t feel the same way, I really will, but I can’t not tell you. I just… I need you to know.”

For a few minutes, while Ratchet’s brain caught up with the flood of words, he could only blink at Drift’s expectant face. “Drift,” he began carefully.

It wasn’t that he didn’t _care_ ; after all they’d been through together, Ratchet was finally starting to see Drift not as a flaky power-grabbing ex-Decepticon, but as an Autobot trying to atone for what he’d done during a war with no clean hands on either side. No matter the façade of blithe cheerfulness Drift put up, he still clearly felt the repercussions of his past. More than that, he was trying to move on and create a better future. He was capable and intelligent, compassionate and caring.

Still further, Drift was a _friend_. Ratchet couldn’t return his feelings, even if Drift had completely blind-sided him, but he didn’t have to crush them, either.

“No, I get it,” Drift said, cutting him off with a choked little laugh. “I do. It’s okay, it really is.” He backed toward the door. “I… forget I said anything, okay?”

“Drift, wait,” Ratchet said, but the door was already closing. The split second Ratchet had to decide whether or not to go after him was interrupted by Rodimus making the shipwide announcement of Drift’s previously mentioned dubious lead, and all the doors were locked until the announcement was over.

By the time Ratchet got the door open again, Drift was gone. Ratchet looked down one side of the corridor and then the other, before deciding that it would be better to give Drift some time to calm down.  If he hadn’t seen him again by the end of the day, he decided, he’d find him and drag him out to Swerve’s for a drink.

In the meantime, Ratchet had a few things to take care of.

“You want me to do what?” First Aid, except for an initial tremor that could have been either panic or excitement, was remarkably calm.

“I want you to act as CMO for the duration of the upcoming incident,” Ratchet said.  First Aid’s optics narrowed.

“Why do you say incident?” he asked. “It sounds like you’re expecting a disaster.”

“Have you _met_ Rodimus?”

“Fair point,” First Aid conceded. “Okay, the upcoming incident.”

“You know the procedures and you know the protocols. I’ll let Hoist and Ambulon know you’re in charge until further notice.” Ratchet smiled and clapped First Aid on the shoulder. “You’re ready for this.”

“I won’t let you down,” First Aid said.  It was hard to tell, what with the face mask, but Ratchet thought he was smiling.

“I know you won’t,” he said. “Nothing else changes – duty shifts and rosters remain the same, unless you see fit, for some reason, to make a change.”

“Uh, no, I think we should be fine on that score,” First Aid said, sounding ever so slightly nervous for the first time. “No, they’re definitely fine,” he said after a brief pause. Ratchet could almost see him verifying the schedules in his head, and he hid his own smile.

Ship protocol demanded that the commander also be informed of any change in officers’ status, so after leaving messages for Ambulon and Hoist (the latter just in case of an actual catastrophe, as Hoist wasn’t technically part of the medibay staff), Ratchet went to track down and tell Rodimus of First Aid’s trial run.

“Oh, good,” Rodimus said from the other side of his door. Ratchet had been eyeing the stenciled flames around the frame and wondering if they – along with the rather premature plaque – could meet with a tragic demise, and Rodimus startled him enough that he took a small step back.

“You don’t even know why I’m here,” he pointed out.

“I need you to settle something,” Rodimus continued breezily, and then he stopped. “Wait, why are you here? And then I need you to settle a disagreement.”

“I’m not a negotiator,” Ratchet pointed out, stepping around Rodimus to enter his quarters. Drift was seated on Rodimus’ recharge slab, and Ratchet froze.  Drift stiffened and then deliberately relaxed.

“Ratchet,” he said.

“Drift,” Ratchet returned, unlocking his joints. Rodimus glanced between the two of them.

“Is there something going on?” he asked, picking what was, as far as Ratchet was concerned, exactly the wrong time to display just how perceptive he was capable of being.

“No,” Drift said, just as Ratchet said, “Yes.”

“Okay, we’re having three different conversations here. One at a time. First.” Rodimus pointed a laser scalpel directly at Ratchet, who batted his hand downward before said cutting tool put a hole through his chestplate. Rodimus looked at his hand, as if surprised, and let the scalpel fall to his graffiti-covered desk. “Right. First. Ratchet. What did you want to say?”

Ratchet told him.

“Yeah, okay.” Rodimus grinned. “We’ll see how First Aid holds up in a crisis – hey, you think there’s going to be a crisis.”

“I said potential incident,” Ratchet pointed out. “Anything could happen on this planet.”

“Fine,” Rodimus conceded. “We’ll see how First Aid does.”

“Thanks,” Ratchet said, and attempted to leave.

“We’re not done,” Rodimus said, and Ratchet stifled a curse. “You’re a reasonable bot, Ratchet.”

“Uh, yes?” Ratchet said, not sure where Rodimus was going with it.

“Surely you concede that a lead toward the objective of our quest should be followed.”

“That would depend on the source of the lead,” Ratchet said cautiously. “If the source is reliable, then the lead should be followed.”

“The source is the Decepticons,” Drift said.

“The ones in the brig?” Ratchet stared at Rodimus. “Why would you –“ He paused and modulated his tone of voice to something more appropriate for addressing a senior officer. Rodimus was starting to get that look. “I’m not entirely sure a Decepticon qualifies as a trustworthy source of information.”

“It’s all of them,” Rodimus said. “Okay, okay, I know, they’ve had time to talk to each other and work out a story, but there’s a binary system exactly where they said it would be, and there are six planets orbiting both suns.”

“The binary system is on the map,” Drift said. “Along with its six planets.” He sounded like he’d said it before.

“The moons around the fourth planet aren’t, and they’re what we’re interested in,” Rodimus said.

“What exactly did the Decepticons say?” Ratchet asked.

“The largest of the three moons is supposedly the first stop on course for whoever kidnapped the Circle of Light,” Rodimus said. He looked at Drift. “I thought you’d be all over this. Usually Magnus is the one complaining.”

“I’m not complaining!” Drift said hotly, standing. “I’m trying to tell you to be careful! Decepticons lie!”

“Oh, and you would know, is that it?” Rodimus faced down his third in command. Drift took an aggressive step forward, and Rodimus backed off. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

“That was a dirty fragging shot,” Drift said quietly.

“I know.” Rodimus passed a hand over his face. “I know. It was uncalled for.”

Ratchet glanced at the door and briefly considered another escape attempt, but both Drift and Rodimus were between him and it. “I’d advocate caution as well,” he said.

“Oh, you both sound like Ultra Magnus,” Rodimus said, but there was no heat to his words. “We’ll go in quietly, but I don’t think we can afford to pass this up.”

“Why do the Decepticons know what we’re doing out here?” Ratchet asked.

“I don’t think they do,” Rodimus said.

“Then how do they know we’d be interested in the Circle of Light?”

“Their exact phrasing was something along the lines of _We know something about that neutral cult half of you peace-loving spawns of glitches probably idealized_.” Drift ran a hand down the blade of one of the swords at his hip. Ratchet didn’t think he knew he was doing it.

“Huh.” Ratchet tilted his head to the side. “We’re still remarkably conveniently near to their alleged first stop.”

“Not really,” Rodimus said. “We’ve been going at near all-out speed since last night, and unless I miss my guess, we’re currently hiding behind the other moon.”

“Of course we have,” Ratchet said after a short pause, remembering the vibration in the deck plates. “Since Ultra Magnus re-boarded.”

“More or less.” Rodimus smiled and shrugged. “Hey, at least I’m giving a proper briefing this time.”

“Pffft,” Ratchet said. “I’m still coming down on the side of caution. Particularly,” he held up a quelling finger, “since there are still certain members of this crew whose recovery from Strain Five isn’t 100%.”

“Sunstreaker isn’t cleared to go topside,” Rodimus said quickly.  Sunstreaker had had the worst of the rust plague, but he hadn’t been the only one to reach the final stage of the disease; it had been a stroke of pure luck that no one had actually died.

“I wasn’t only talking about Sunstreaker,” Ratchet said. Rodimus himself had been comatose while the rust slowly dissolved his internal mechanisms, and Drift hadn’t been much better off. “I can produce a list.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Rodimus said.

“The very fact that you assume I’m talking about _you_ leads me to conclude that you don’t quite feel fully recovered,” Ratchet said, just to see how Rodimus would respond.

Rodimus stared at him, the very epitome of guilt. Ratchet resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose; it was a human gesture and a bad habit.

“You haven’t been entirely forthcoming,” he said. “Your medical clearance to leave the ship is revoked.”

“If you’re not acting CMO, you don’t have the authority to do that,” Rodimus said quickly, and Ratchet glared. “Fine, _fine_ , I’ll send Ultra Magnus, _are you happy_.”

“Happy is a strong word,” Ratchet said, and fixed his gaze on Drift. He’d forgotten entirely about their awkward conversation until he met Drift’s eyes, and then he couldn’t help freezing again. “You,” he said with a total lack of smoothness. “Have you been lying to me as well?”

“No,” Drift said softly, somehow evoking every exchange they’d ever had.

“All right then,” Ratchet said.

“That’s just not fair,” Rodimus said.

“He hasn’t been hiding things.” Ratchet stepped between them. “I expect you in the medibay to make up for the last three exams you missed. If you’ll excuse me.”

“Now, hang on –“ Rodimus’ voice was cut off by the closing door. Ratchet moved rapidly down the corridor and around the nearest corner. Just in case of future idiocy, he sent a note to First Aid about Rodimus’ medical clearance. It wasn’t that he thought Rodimus wasn’t healthy enough to leave the ship; it was more about the attitude. The crew of the Lost Light needed Rodimus to be fit to carry out his duties, and Rodimus needed to take that seriously.

The conversation about Rodimus’ responsibility to keep himself functioning wasn’t going to happen that particular day, Ratchet soon found out. It was nearly the farthest thing from his mind when the explosion from that morning was mirrored tenfold and Ratchet found himself all but embedded in the nearest wall.

Emergency claxons shrieked, drowning out any sound Ratchet might have made. Siren’s voice penetrated the riot, exhorting the crew to keep calm and move to their duty stations if unhurt and report to the medibay in case of injury. Ratchet peeled himself out of the wall and headed for the medibay at a flat-out run.

No one was in the hallways between where he’d hit the bulkheads and the medibay doors, and the deck plates had ceased their constant vibration, leaving Ratchet with the unpleasant sense of being aboard another dead ghost ship, drifting through space. The medibay doors slid halfway open and stalled out.  Ratchet shoved them open; they stayed wedged where he left them.

“What’s going on?” he demanded.

First Aid shook his head. “The starboard engine exploded. Trailbreaker is the only thing holding that side of the ship together. Casualties are headed this way.”

“Right.” Ratchet nodded. “Call the shots.”

“Uh, right.” First Aid looked for a moment as if he wanted to hand the authority right back to Ratchet, but then he squared his shoulders. “Okay.”

The first wave of Autobots injured in the explosion reached the medibay scant seconds later, and Ratchet was up to his elbows in energon and internal mechanisms. First Aid performed admirably, setting up triage stations and accurately assessing the level of injury sustained by each new casualty. Ratchet’s world narrowed to each recharge slab in front of him, each gaping hole or broken fluid line or – in the worst cases – damaged t-cog.

The flood seemed to slow quickly, but when Ratchet was finally sure enough that no one else was going to die to access his internal chronometer, he was surprised both at how much and how little time had passed. His normal shift would have been barely half over.

“Next,” he started to say, and only then registered Siren’s voice over the intercom.

**Security protocols in place. Crew members not on security detail remain stationary. Movement between sections is prohibited.**

The three sentences were apparently on a loop; Ratchet wasn’t sure if Siren was simply repeating himself or if there was a recorded message going, and either way the situation was far from resolved.

“Why?” he asked, jerking his them towards the nearest speaker.  It was Hoist who answered, wiping energon off his hands with a not-particularly-clean rag.

“The Cons in the brig broke out,” he said, and Ratchet realized that Hoist’s most recent patient – Smokescreen, supplied a corner of his mind – was sporting injuries specific to blaster fire.

“Scrap,” Ratchet muttered, and glanced at the door.

“Stay where you are,” First Aid said, voice all but ringing with authority. “There are enough guns on this ship to handle a few Cons. You’re needed here.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Ratchet said, which was when Pointblank dragged an offline Powerflash through the doors.

“Con boarding party,” Pointblank hissed, depositing Powerflash into Hoist’s arms. “More than were in the brig. Radio if they try to break in here.”  Despite sporting a heavily damaged leg, Pointblank exited the medibay over protest.

“He’s fading fast,” Hoist reported, and Ambulon materialized behind him.

“There’s a fresh slab over here,” he said, and Ratchet gave the doorway a last look before moving to the next injured patient on the triage list, and the next. The only way the ones left would die of their wounds would be if they were left untreated. Ratchet worked as efficiently as he could, stabilizing with the intent to return when possible. He could hear the sounds of the firefight now, moving through the hallways and echoing through the vents.

Skids dropped to the ground beside Ratchet as he moved between patients, startling him badly. Skids effectively dodged the automatic jab Ratchet sent his way with the laser scalpel, sending a wave of energon cascading across his skin.

“Where did you slagging come from?” Ratchet asked, but the vent cover swinging above his head gave away the answer.

“Have you seen Rodimus?” Skids asked urgently, optics flickering. He grabbed Ratchet’s upper arms, although Ratchet couldn’t tell if that was for balance or intimidation.

“No,” Ratchet said, carefully removing Skids’ fingers and maneuvering him to the next empty section. “Sit down.”

“I don’t have time to sit down. They’re going to detonate –“ Skids’ head swiveled around. “Did you hear that?”

“No, and if I don’t repair this fuel line, you’re going to bleed out and die.” Ratchet pushed Skids back down.

“That doesn’t matter. Wait, what?” Skids focused on him, frowning. “Ratchet?”

“Yes,” Ratchet said absently, already focused on the broken line under Skids’ armor. The theoretician’s energon levels weren’t quite low enough to be life-threatening, but it wouldn’t be long before it got that far. “Hold still.”

“Is this the medibay?” Skids twisted around until Ratchet thumped his shoulder.  “I was aiming for the oil reserve,” he muttered, rubbing a shaking hand over his eyes.

“You missed,” Ratchet said, clamping down on the line in question. “And you should stay here,” he added.

“I can’t.” Skids looked down at himself. “You about done there?”

“Until the next time you get thrown into the ceiling, yes.” Skids would survive until he could be properly treated.

“Great.” While Ratchet turned away to clean off his instruments for the next patient, Skids hauled himself back into the ceiling.

“Get back here!” Ratchet snapped. “You’re going to tear that right back open unless you stay still!”

“No can do,” Skids said, voice floating downwards from the vents. He poked his head back out. “You haven’t seen Rodimus either?”

“No,” Ratchet said. “Was he injured?”

“Uh,” Skids said. “If he comes in here, use his inter-Autobot radio, set to the second delta frequency.” He pulled his head back up and yanked the vent cover shut.

“There is no second delta frequency!” Ratchet shouted after him, starting to feel real fear.

“Hoist, Ambulon, take whatever weaponry you’ve got and assist in fending off the Decepticons,” First Aid said. Ratchet blinked. Powerflash was stable, more or less, laid out on a recharge slab. “Follow Skids.”

The two of them swarmed up in the ceiling, following the Lost Light’s resident amnesiac. The vent clanged shut for the second time, leaving Ratchet cold. “I –“ he started.

“I need you here.” First Aid was wrist-deep in Aquafend’s internal mechanisms, but when Ratchet looked around, there was no one else who hadn’t been treated.

“But –“ he started.

“Ratchet.” First Aid paused his work to glare. “Of the four of us, you’ve got the most skill. You’re the last one who’s going to leave this medibay to join the fighting.”

Ratchet slammed his fist into the nearest wall and went to do what he could beyond just stabilizing the Autobots who hadn’t headed back out to rejoin the fray. For a moment, he regretted not asking Skids if he’d seen Drift, and his hands stilled. He pushed the thought away, but it stubbornly returned. He gritted his teeth and ignored it. There was a ship full of stubborn Autobots to worry about, and fretting about a specific friend would get him nowhere.

Silence gradually fell in the halls outside, the sounds of fighting that had echoed down into the medibay dying out. Ratchet listened with half an ear, waiting for the ceiling to open up again or for someone to come through the door.  When someone finally did, he wasn’t prepared for it.

Rodimus, uninjured for the most part after all, rushed in with a familiar red and white form cradled in scorched arms.  “Ratchet,” he said, voice broken.

“I got him.”  The last open recharge slab was the farthest from the door.  Rodimus shook his head. 

“Show me where.” He followed Ratchet across the room, moving surely and steadily.

“The Decepticons?” Ratchet asked as they threaded their way across the floor.

“Soundly defeated.” Rodimus lowered Drift to the table.  “You’ll have to, um, extract him.”

Drift’s chest plating had partially melted off, hardening over Rodimus’ arms and freezing them in place.  Ratchet broke the brittle metal and prepared to get to work. “Stay over there.”  He glanced at First Aid, but Rodimus had only been the first of what was hopefully the final wave. He turned back to Drift.

It was horribly and blindingly clear that there was nothing that could be done. Ratchet couldn’t tell what kind of weapon Drift had apparently blocked with his own body, but its damage was all too clear. Drift’s spark was all but gone, his weakened spark casing cracked in two, and his t-cog was a shredded mess.

“Ratchet,” he heard. The raspy voice was coming from Drift’s vocal processor. 

“Stop talking.” The rules of triage were clear; Ratchet had to walk away and move on to someone who could be saved.

“Don’t waste your time,” Drift said, the blue glow of his optics fading.

“You’re not a waste of my time,” Ratchet snapped, working faster. Drift smiled at that, wide and bright, and his spark guttered out. “No!” His denial only lasted a few brief seconds; there were more people in danger of death or permanent injury, and there would be time to mourn later. Ratchet turned away.

“You have to save him!” Rodimus launched himself at Ratchet. “You can’t let him die!”

Ratchet caught his commander and used his momentum to send him crashing to the ground. “He’s gone! Get it together, Rodimus!”

Rodimus curled into a ball around his scored and bleeding chassis. He wasn’t the worst injured; Ratchet left him to it and moved on to the next. And the next. By the time there was no next, 38 Autobots had joined Drift and over two thirds of the remaining crew had sustained damage. Ratchet himself was on the verge of involuntary shut-down; he’d eventually found a slow energon leak in his own systems from being flung into the wall by the first explosion. Since it hadn’t been plugged, it had gradually drained his reserves.

“Stay down,” First Aid murmured, deftly patching the injury.

“This is a nightmare,” Ratchet said dully. The dead clogged the corridors to make room for the still living; he could see them through the door, still stuck open. Skids in particular caught his optics, the fuel lines Ratchet had repaired once again torn open. There was nothing left in them, though, not any more.

“Get some rest,” First Aid said, and Ratchet pulled his optics away from Skids. “We’re all going to need it.”

Ratchet off-lined his optics, intending to give his systems a few minutes to stabilize before going back to work, but something shifted and consciousness slid away. He on-lined his optics again to find himself staring at the ceiling in his hab suite.

“What?” he muttered, blinking. He’d passed out in the medibay, he was sure of it. How had there been the manpower to transport him back to his own room, and more importantly, how long had he been unconscious?

A query to his internal chronometer told him nothing; the chronometer was offline. That would account for some of the lingering disorientation, Ratchet felt. He sat up gingerly, intending on thumping the ship’s systems until they told him what time it was, and felt nothing more than a slight pulling along one side. He frowned and looked down at his torso. The only apparent injury was the minor cut he’d gotten from colliding with Brainstorm and Rodimus two days before, looking as fresh as it had the previous morning.  There was no other evidence of injury.

“What,” Ratchet said flatly. There was no way he’d been out long enough for the wall-derived injuries to heal, and there was the fresh cut anyway, giving the vague idea the lie. Ratchet swung himself onto his feet and left his hab suite to find some answers.

The corridors between his room and the medibay were undamaged, and the medibay doors slid open and shut without protest. Ratchet eyed them suspiciously. He was sure the doors had been broken. He clearly remembered damage resulting in them sticking open, and yet here they were. Was it possible that he’d had some kind of off-line hallucination, he wondered. It wasn’t unheard of, although imagery playing out in the main processor during regeneration was often indicative of great stress, and Ratchet didn’t think he was under that much pressure.

“What’s wrong with the door?” First Aid said, coming around the corner.

“Nothing,” Ratchet said, still frowning. “That’s the problem.” He couldn’t have seen the entire thing while offline; there had been too much detail, it had been too vivid. So why had the doors been repaired?

“Uh,” said First Aid.

“They were stuck,” Ratchet said. “After the explosion.”

“What explosion?” First Aid said guardedly.

“Yesterday,” Ratchet said impatiently, and then the emptiness of the medbay struck him nearly hard enough to affect his balance. “Where is everyone?”

“What do you mean, everyone? You and I are the only ones on shift.” First Aid looked worried, now.

“Everyone who was in here _yesterday_ ,” Ratchet said, a sinking feeling blooming underneath his spark. “Don’t tell me they _all died_ while I was recharging.”

“No one’s been in here,” First Aid said. “It’s been quiet as a mausoleum.”

A muffled boom underlined his words, and Ratchet narrowed his optics.

“I jinxed us,” First Aid muttered ruefully.  Ratchet growled at him and got on the comm to find out what had gone wrong _this_ time.

 _Everything is fine,_ Powerflash said. _Uh, scratch that, one incoming casualty._

“What exploded?” Ratchet snapped, but Powerflash had already signed out. Ratchet suddenly realized Powerflash had repeated his statement from the previous morning, word for word. “That’s it,” Ratchet said, and stalked toward the door.

“Where are you going?” First Aid caught him by the elbow.

“To find out what in slagging Primus’ name is going on,” Ratchet said.  First Aid pulled him back. Perceptor walked in on the ensuing scuffle, carrying one arm.

“What happened to you?” First Aid asked, staring.

“Smokescreen,” Perceptor said, with the same annoyed expression he’d had the previous day. Shrapnel studded his chestplate.

“What’s the date?” Ratchet asked suddenly. Both Perceptor and First Aid turned to stare at him. “My internal chronometer is malfunctioning.”

First Aid told him.

“That was yesterday,” Ratchet protested.

“Okay, no. You go sit over there. I’m going to reattach Perceptor’s arm and then I’m going to take a look at the inside of your head.” First Aid deftly maneuvered Ratchet onto a recharge slab and turned his attention to Perceptor.

Ratchet watched both of them, wondering if he’d had a particularly vivid off-line hallucination after the tumble in the corridors after all, or if perhaps he was going mad.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

“There’s nothing wrong,” First Aid announced, staring at Ratchet with an almost offended look. “You said there was an explosion?”

“Multiple,” Ratchet said, although by this point it was clear that the engines had never exploded and the Decepticons were still in the brig. “Someone should check the starboard engine.”

“You realize that sounds a little –“ First Aid paused, clearly searching for the right word to use in calling his superior officer crazy.

“Demented? Yes.” Ratchet climbed off the exam table, feeling around the base of his skull to make sure everything had been properly reattached. “But I saw Perceptor happen the same way.”

First Aid hadn’t lost the dubious edge to his posture when he commed Rodimus to request an engine inspection, and it leaked through his voice.

 _Look, we don’t have-_ came Rodimus’ voice over the comm. _It’s on the list, okay? We got a new lead – and I can’t believe I’m telling you first, the major announcement is coming – we got a new lead on the Knights. That comes first._

 _On the list isn’t good enough_ , Ratchet snapped into the comm. _You’ve got less than two hours before something goes catastrophically wrong._

 _Calm down_ , Rodimus said.

 _I am calm!_ Ratchet would have said more, but First Aid smoothly blocked his access, and that was the end of that conversation.

“I’m going to check the off-liners,” First Aid said. “Maybe you should take a little time to yourself. You’ll feel better.”

“I am not _overworked_ ,” Ratchet said, and that was when Drift walked through the door, right on schedule.  First Aid made himself scarce. Ratchet glowered after his CMO in training for a moment.

“Ratchet,” Drift said. “I, uh.” He paused, fiddling with his own fingertips.

“I know,” Ratchet said. “Rodimus just told us. New lead.” His mind wasn’t on the conversation at all; he was focused on the potential catastrophic engine explosion. “But that doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Drift said, looking stricken, and Ratchet hastily replayed the last few seconds of conversation. Drift hadn’t quite repeated what he’d said the day before word for word, but it had been close.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Ratchet said, but Drift was already gone and Rodimus was making the ship-wide announcement of the new lead. “The entire slagging day _is_ repeating itself. Either that, or I’ve suddenly gained the ability to see into the future.”

Neither thought was particularly comforting. Marginally less comforting was the thought that he might possibly have just completely lost his grip on sanity; it wasn’t an unknown occurrence. Ratchet stared at the hallway in indecision for a few more minutes.  Trying to convince Rodimus that the engines were going to explode was clearly a lost cause, and trying to get Magnus or Drift on his side wouldn’t win Rodimus over either.

Mind made up, Ratchet headed down toward engineering. Somewhat to his chagrin, he couldn’t get anywhere near the engines and the increasingly loud argument that something was about to go wrong wasn’t doing him any favors.

“There is absolutely no way the engine is going to spontaneously explode,” Rad said patiently for the sixth time, physically blocking Ratchet from going anywhere.

“You don’t understand!” The clock was ticking down, if Ratchet remembered correctly. If things progressed the way they had in his dream or vision or whatever it had been, there were a number of people who were about to die. If he was wrong, then so be it, but it wasn’t a chance Ratchet could take. He didn’t explain it to Rad again, though; the first three times hadn’t helped and a fourth wouldn’t do any good.

“Look, Ratchet, I know things have been –“ Rad started.

“This is not due to stress!” Ratchet’s hands were shaking badly enough that Rad was staring at them. “Can you just…”

The rest of the sentence was cut off by the sound of the engine exploding and taking the corridor with it.  Ratchet dimly felt the blast wave throw him through the floor before everything went dark. 

The shadows faded into the ceiling of Ratchet’s hab suite, brightly lit.  Ratchet tensed for an impact that wasn’t there, wincing as gears locked in protest when he flinched against the unyielding surface of his recharge slab.  The scrape down his side pulled unpleasantly.

“You’ve got to be slagging joking,” he said, when he’d managed to get his joints unlocked. His internal chronometer still wasn’t working, and it gave him a vaguely unanchored sensation. The ship’s systems gave him the same time and date he’d woken up with on the first day of the explosion. “This is ridiculous.”

The corridors were clean and empty, just as they had been on the first day. Ratchet was not willing to concede either that the day was repeating or that he had had some sort of prophetic vision. Far more likely was that stress was giving him offline hallucinations. Stress was, in fact, the most rational answer.  To prove the point to himself, he commed Smokescreen. “Whatever you’re doing, cut it out,” he said when the channel opened.

What Ratchet expected was that Smokescreen, not engaged in a prank of any kind, would respond with either confusion or indignation. Smokescreen’s response ran contrary to Ratchet’s expectations.

 _How did you_ – Smokescreen started, and Ratchet heard something explode in stereo; the noise came both clearly through the comm and muffled through the decks above him.

“Smokescreen,” Ratchet said, keeping his voice steady through sheer will. He forced down the little internal monologue shrieking about time loops and foretelling the future both leading to the same disaster.

“Yes?” Smokescreen’s voice was apprehensive and there was a slight burr. Ratchet put it down to a potentially damaged vocal processor.

“Report to Ultra Magnus and let him determine the consequences of causing damage to Perceptor’s lab.” Ratchet walked through the medibay’s undamaged doors.

 _The lab isn’t damaged_ , Smokescreen said. _Just the corridor. And, uh, me._

 “Report to the medibay first, then.” He closed the channel before it occurred to Smokescreen that Ratchet didn’t technically have the authority to send him to Ultra Magnus. Whether he’d seen the future or was reliving the past, something was different already. That had to count for something.

“I see the catastrophe has started early,” First Aid said cheerfully, having apparently heard the conversation.

“There isn’t going to be a catastrophe,” Ratchet snapped. “Take care of Smokescreen when he gets here.”

“Wait, where are you going?” First Aid asked.

“I have something to do.” Ratchet looked around the medibay, searching for some sign of the events that he remembered from two days before, even the day before. There was nothing.

“You’re supposed to be on shift,” First Aid said.

“I’ll be back.” Ratchet eyed his subordinate. “Starting tomorrow, I want you to spend a few days acting as CMO.”

“Tomorrow?” First Aid’s optics shuttered briefly. “Why tomorrow?”

Because today is going to be a catastrophe of war-time proportions and I don’t trust that you’ll handle it properly, Ratchet did not say. The pause didn’t go unnoticed, but First Aid didn’t say anything else. “Review protocol first,” Ratchet said eventually, and First Aid nodded. He exited the medibay just as Smokescreen walked in, looking rather worse for the wear.

“I dropped it,” Smokescreen said mournfully, and Ratchet suppressed both a wordless expression of frustration and the question of what, exactly, Smokescreen had been trying to do with fluorescent paint and explosives.

“Inside. You. Now,” he said instead, and went toward the engines.

When Ratchet reached engineering, he found Rad markedly less guarded than the day before.

“You know we perform regular diagnostics,” Rad said, clearly humoring him but with no sense of suspicion.

“I know,” Ratchet said. “But could the diagnostics miss something unlikely?”

“Well.” Rad blew out some heated air, clearly considering. He was so much more accommodating than he had been the previous day that it was almost eerie; the reason occurred to Ratchet and he stifled a curse.

“Rodimus, you little bastard,” he muttered subvocally. The commander had radioed down to Rad and told him not to let Ratchet anywhere near the engines.

“What was that?” Rad asked.

“Nothing,” Ratchet said. “Just a note for later this afternoon.”

“Uh huh.” Rad gave him a slightly skeptical look. “Not to pry, Ratchet, but isn’t this a little outside your purview?”

“Um.” Ratchet didn’t have an answer for that one. “Little bit.”

Rad threw up his hands. “You realize we have a lot of work to do.”

“Please.” The desperate sense of urgency was leaking through, no matter how hard he tried to remain calm. Ratchet tried to keep it suppressed, but he could tell he wasn’t doing very well. Rad was giving him an odd look. “I know the engines are running at maximum capacity,” he added. “Isn’t it possible that some tiny malfunction could cause a problem?”

“Were,” Rad said.

“Excuse me?”

“The engines were running at maximum capacity,” Rad said. “We’ve been maneuvering on thrusters for the past four minutes. And how did you know that?”

“Vibration in the deck plates,” Ratchet said, which was patently absurd. Rad didn’t call him out on it, though.

“Look, there was a minor field discrepancy,” Rad said after a moment. “As soon as the ship is stationary, we’re running a scan to find the source.”

“Okay.” Ratchet nodded.

“Will it bring you peace of mind if I give you the results of the scan?” Rad asked, somewhat drily.

“Yes,” Ratchet said, choosing to interpret the apparent sarcasm as sincerity.

“Oh, fine.” Rad clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll talk to you later, then.”

“Thank you.” It didn’t occur to Ratchet until he was most of the way back to the medibay that Rad noting the field discrepancy and planning the scan wasn’t something that Ratchet had talked him into. “He’s done it twice already,” he said out loud.

“Done what?” Drift asked, and Ratchet spun around in surprise.  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Drift added.

“I know about the announcement,” Ratchet said, and Drift shook his head.

“That’s not what I – how do you know?”

“I just – what do you mean, that’s not what you wanted to talk to me about?” Ratchet blinked. Drift had used Rodimus’ announcement of the new lead in the Knights Quest as a lead-in to his very awkward confession twice now; there was no reason why this time should be any different, and yet it was.

“Can we go somewhere else?” Drift asked, and Ratchet found himself closeted with the other mech in his office in short order. There was still time before disaster struck.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, because with everything else that had been running differently from his memories, it was possible that Drift wasn’t going to repeat his speech. 

Ratchet was wrong. Drift repeated the speech he remembered almost verbatim, and looked at him expectantly.

“I can’t let you down gently,” Ratchet said. “I see you as a friend, Drift.”

“I get it,” Drift said. “I do. It’s okay.” He held up a hand to forestall Ratchet’s next words. “It really is. I… forget I said anything, okay?” He nearly walked into the doorframe on his way out.

Ratchet let him go this time; Rodimus was making his announcement over all channels and the doors had automatically locked. He drummed his fingers on the desk, thoughts returning to the engine malfunction.  If Rad had run the diagnostic both times and the engine had still exploded, he’d missed whatever had caused it.

Considering the idea of talking to the engineering staff about what was about to go wrong lasted only a few seconds before Ratchet discarded it. He already knew what would happen, but there was another option. The vents would lead right to the starboard engine.  Ratchet locked his office door from the inside and climbed up into the ceiling.

Security was rather appalling, all things considered. Ratchet made it almost the entire way into the engineering section before seeing anything at all out of the ordinary. Ratchet was sure the wires leading from a side passage down toward the engines were definitely not supposed to be there. He glanced down the passage, torn between following them to their source and to their destination.

Destination won out, as it was the engine that concerned him. The thought of sabotage was now replacing the idea of a random accident as the cause of the engine explosion, and that made Ratchet incredibly uneasy. It had implications he didn’t want to consider.

The wires led to an unassuming little box.  Ratchet moved around the box, careful not to touch it.  There was a countdown on the front, red numbers glowing ominously, but as soon as Ratchet saw it, it blinked twice and reset to zero.  His optics widened and then the world vanished in an all-consuming fireball.

Burning orange flame and black smoke resolved into the ceiling of Ratchet’s hab suite. “That was deliberate,” he said, almost surprised to find his voice working. “Someone planted a bomb.”


	3. Chapter 3

Hard on the heels of the revelation of intentional explosives was the unavoidable conclusion that Ratchet was somehow repeating the same day, over and over. Ratchet blinked at the ceiling for a moment, checked his internal chronometer out of habit, pushed away the mild disorientation at finding the chronometer non-functional, and considered options.

“This might be a hallucination,” he said out loud, trying to avoid the conclusion anyway.  “Except that I wouldn’t be able to rationally consider the possibility were this internally induced.” He paused for a moment. “Consider that my brain has been hijacked. There aren’t any glitches that would indicate an artificial environment, and the Lost Light doesn’t have the appropriate equipment.” He stopped again as something else occurred to him. “It couldn’t be Chromedome, either, since I’m not reliving memories.  Not really.”

Not that the idea of a time loop wasn’t ludicrous, but if Ratchet wasn’t in the middle of a dream, or a hallucination, or a brain-hijacking, there weren’t many options left.

“And it’s not like you haven’t seen ridiculous things before,” he said to himself, realized that he’d somehow come to consider talking out loud while there was no one else to hear a viable course of action, and started thinking about options instead.

‘Fact,’ Ratchet thought, ‘there’s a bomb on the Lost Light. Fact – the engines are going to be sabotaged.  Fact – initial attempts at involving the chain of command and the engineering crew have not gone well.’ The obvious course of action was to make the bomb go away.  Ratchet pulled himself into the ceiling.

Halfway to the engine, it occurred to him to wonder why he hadn’t gone most of the way through the ship’s corridors; it would have been quicker. “Slag it,” he muttered, and kept going.

There wasn’t much traffic in the corridors below him, but no one noticed him crawling through the ceiling. Ratchet was sorely tempted more than once to shout at the mechs passing by to be more aware of their surroundings; no wonder he kept ending up with missing limbs to reattach, if this was how the crew conducted itself, he thought sourly. 

The bomb was in the same place it had been the last time, wires trailing down another vent.  Ratchet eyed the unassuming little box and followed the wires instead; they went nowhere particularly exciting, except for the part where they were spliced into the ship’s systems.  Ratchet didn’t know enough about the Lost Light’s internal workings to say exactly what the bomb had been wired into, but he was willing to go out on a limb and call it not good.

Ratchet eased himself into a kneeling position next to the opened panel and stared at the wires for a few minutes before sending a very narrow-banded message.

“Tailgate.”

 _R-Ratchet?_ came the reply through the inter-Autobot radio.

“I need you to talk me through something.”  The panicky little mech was supposed to be a bomb disposal expert, after all. “But first I have a question.”

_Uh. Um. Yes. Yes, okay. What can I do for you?_

“If a bomb is wired into the Lost Light, what might that mean?”

 _A_ what _? Ratchet, did you find a bomb?_

“Just answer the question.”

_Well, nothing good. Absolutely nothing good. Don’t touch the – what systems?_

“How should I know? I’m a doctor, not an engineer.”

 _Rather similar, all things considered._ That wasn’t Tailgate’s transmission; Ratchet recognized Cyclonus.

“Assume it probably has something to do with the engines.” Ratchet extended a finger and very carefully poked at the wires. They were tightly woven into something, but he had no idea what.

 _Why the engines?_ Cyclonus asked, right over Tailgate wanting to know if he’d told Rodimus, or at least Ultra Magnus and how did Ratchet know there was a bomb on the ship anyway. _Be silent!_ Cyclonus sent, although Ratchet was fairly sure that wasn’t meant for him.

“It’s a rhetorical question,” Ratchet said finally.

 _That’s a very specific rhetorical question_ , Cyclonus said, and then there was a long pause.

 _The bomb might be drawing energy from the ship,_ Tailgate said. _Disconnecting the wires might shut it down._

“Fantastic,” Ratchet said, and shut off the transmission. Cycling air across his vents, Ratchet grabbed the wires and pulled.  Something clicked, almost too far away to hear, and the all-consuming roar of the explosion pushed him through the vent into the floor and he found himself staring up at his ceiling again. “That went less than well,” he said dryly. 

The next seven attempts to disarm the bomb went no better; cutting either or both the wires had the same effect as pulling them out of the wall, and every time he got near the bomb itself it set its timer to zero.  Ratchet hadn’t ever expected to feel routine frustration at a mass of explosives going off in his face, and yet there he was, staring at the ceiling again.  He was beginning to suspect motion detectors, but he wasn’t sure how to get around those.

“Ultra Magnus,” he sent, still staring at the ceiling.

 _Ratchet,_ came the reply.

“There’s a bomb wired into the engine. Probably into the engine. I’m not sure.”

_Excuse me?_

At any other time, Ratchet would have savored the shock in Ultra Magnus’ transmission; it was generally difficult to get anything but irritation or neutrality out of the SiC, and any other reaction was a moment to set aside. At this point, however, he simply wanted the engines to not get turned into so much scrap.

“You heard me,” he said. “Bomb. Engine. I can’t disconnect it.”

 _Where are you?_ Ultra Magnus sent back, as if he didn’t know exactly where Ratchet was. Ratchet sent him the location of the bomb instead.

“I’m not there,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure it has motion detectors attached, and if you get too close to it, it’ll explode.”

 _Stay there_ , Ultra Magnus sent back.

Ratchet went to the medibay; he got all the way there before Ultra Magnus found him.

“Come with me,” he said, his very bearing screaming _Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord and Director of Security_ , or at least more than it usually did.

“What’s going on?” First Aid asked, coming around the corner. “Nothing catastrophic, I hope.”

“What is it with you and the word catastrophic?” Ratchet demanded.

“What?” First Aid blinked. “I don’t – no, seriously, what’s going on?”

“Now,” Ultra Magnus said, raising his voice slightly, and Ratchet felt the deck plates shake. A brief set of calculations told him that would be Smokescreen’s prank going wrong.

“You’re going to need to reattach Perceptor’s arm,” he told First Aid.

First Aid was at an apparent loss for words; he simply stared at Ratchet, mild static echoing from his vocal processors.

“ _Now, Ratchet,_ ” Ultra Magnus said, and Ratchet followed him before he ended up with dents in his plating.

They didn’t get more than a few feet down the corridor before the deck shuddered violently, the sound of metal screeching on metal echoing through the bulkheads.  Ratchet’s headlong tumble into the walls was slightly cushioned by Ultra Magnus.

“I told you there were motion sensors,” Ratchet groaned, his optics flickering back online.  He couldn’t hear his own voice, though, not even after rebooting his audio receptors.

Ultra Magnus stared at him for three seconds before rapidly climbing to his feet and dragging Ratchet with him.  He said something, using his second expression, and tossed Ratchet through the nearest door.  It was a maintenance closet, more or less bare on the inside. The door slid shut and locked. Ratchet pounded on it.

“What are you doing?”

 _I cannot discount the probability of your involvement in this incident,_ Ultra Magnus sent back via inter-Autobot radio. _You will remain there until the situation has been resolved._

“There are people who need my help!” Ratchet shouted, or at least he thought he did, but Ultra Magnus closed the connection and refused to reopen it. “Slagging glitchspawn.”

The bomb had gone off early, due no doubt to tampering on the part of whoever Ultra Magnus had sent to disarm it, but with the knowledge that the engines had exploded due to outside interference, Ratchet had to assume that the Decepticons were responsible. The jailbreak was going to happen, and earlier than it had when he’d first gone through the loop.  He tried sending a warning to Ultra Magnus, but the comm remained blocked. He tried sending a warning to Rodimus, Drift, anyone who would listen, but Ultra Magnus had cut him off entirely.

“Fine,” he snarled at the stubbornly closed door. He had cutting tools. He had cryogenic equipment.  The door wasn’t going to survive a concerted assault.

It took longer than Ratchet expected, but the door finally swung open.  He ran into the silent corridor, undecided.  There was no sound of a boarding party, no sound of fighting, nothing that he’d expected, and then he remembered that his audio receptors weren’t working properly. “Medibay,” he muttered, and took off running.

The deckplates were completely still, the Lost Light dead in space, and Ratchet saw the signs of combat before he reached the medibay. The dead were stacked outside, spilt energon staining the floor. One of the casualties was Ultra Magnus, head gone entirely. Skids was another, carelessly thrown to one side.  Ratchet skidded into the medibay, slipping on the slick wetness, and tripped over First Aid.

Nothing was alive in the medibay; the patients had each been executed with a precise blast to the spark chamber, as had First Aid. Ambulon had been torn apart, head crushed.  Ratchet pulled himself to his feet, turning slowly.  How had the Decepticons gone through the ship so quickly? He didn’t think it had taken him that long to cut through the door.

A hand yanking him downwards took him completely by surprise; Ratchet lost his footing for the second time in as many minutes and tumbled to the floor. Someone pulled him backwards, and, flailing, Ratchet was too off-balance to resist.

When he finally stopped moving, he turned to see Drift holding a finger to his lips.

“I can’t hear you,” he whispered, or thought he did. Drift slapped his hand over Ratchet’s mouth.

 _Quiet_ , he sent, on a very narrow band with almost no power behind the transmission. _They’ll hear you._

Ratchet mimicked the band and power level. _The Decepticons,_ he said.

 _Ultra Magnus said you had something to do with planting a bomb._ Drift stared at him with so much intensity that Ratchet nearly expected his plating to catch fire.

 _I didn’t. Long story._ Ratchet looked around. Drift had hidden them both under his desk, where they wouldn’t be immediately visible from the door. _What happened?_

 _The engine blew. Hull integrity was compromised. The Cons in the brig broke out, a few more broke in. It went badly._ Drift’s Great Sword was missing, Ratchet noticed, and he had a very inexpertly patched hole in his right side.  That, at least, Ratchet could do something about. He reached for it. _What are you doing?_

 _Fixing you._ Ratchet worked as quickly as he could. _What about Trailbreaker?_

 _One of the first casualties, when the engines went,_ Drift sent.

At least that explained how the Cons had taken control of the wreckage so quickly, Ratchet did not say; without Trailbreaker holding the ship together, there would have been so many more Autobot casualties. _Rodimus?_ he asked instead.

 _I don’t know,_ Drift sent back. _I haven’t seen anyone else._

 _Great,_ Ratchet said. _Then all we have to do is find anyone else alive, neutralize the Cons, and retake the ship. And then put it back together. No problem._ Telling Ultra Magnus about the bomb was apparently a recipe for disaster, he noted internally for the next loop if there was one; he’d spectacularly failed to stop the Cons this time around.

 _Oh, sure, no problem._ Drift grabbed Ratchet’s wrist before he could leave the dubious shelter of the desk. _You should stay here._

 _You need my help,_ Ratchet pointed out.

 _You can’t hear,_ Drift said. _That makes you a liability in the field._

 _That was very blunt of you,_ Ratchet sent back. _You still need me. You can’t do this alone._

 _You’re not coming,_ Drift said.

 _Are we going to argue like human children?_ Ratchet said.

 _I don’t want anything else to happen to you_. Drift nudged him back under the desk, but it was half-hearted. _In case I don’t get another chance to say this –_

 _Tell me when this is over,_ Ratchet sent, and smiled.

 _I…_ Drift set his jaw and climbed to his feet. Ratchet followed. _This way._

The Cons found them before they found anyone else alive, and the last thing Ratchet saw was the barrel of a very large gun pointed directly at one eyeball.  The white of the blast spread into the white of his hab suite ceiling, a sight of which he was getting extraordinarily tired.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully this is worth the delay. :)

Unbidden, the thought crossed Ratchet’s processor that against all odds Ultra Magnus had made everything _worse_ and really at that point he should just have told Rodimus. It was like a wash of cold water inside his plating, and he shivered just a little.

“Bomb in the vents,” he muttered, and wondered if perhaps Skids could do a better job of disarming it. The theoretician had displayed a number of randomly assorted and unexpected skills, and had already proven he had no compunctions about crawling into the ceiling.

Another thought struck Ratchet, and once he’d had it, he wasn’t sure why it had taken so long to occur to him.

“Who put the bomb in the vents?” he said out loud, still lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. “The Decepticons are all in the brig.”

Hoping there was a Decepticon running around the ship undetected was an entirely new experience for Ratchet, and he didn’t like it. The alternative, however, was that someone he’d grown to like – or at least not hate – was acting as a double agent, and he couldn’t help but wonder about Skids.  Skids’ memory had already been tampered with, who knew what had been done to his processor core, and there was the issue about occasional jaunts through the ceiling.

“I don’t like that conclusion,” Ratchet told himself, inadvertently verbally answering First Aid’s ill-timed questioning ping.

 _What conclusion?_ First Aid asked.  _And where are you?_

“I’m not going to be there,” Ratchet said, and shut off the connection. First Aid pinged him again, and again, and yet again, but Ratchet was halfway down the corridor and steadfastly ignoring him by the third ping.  The time loop had given him an opportunity composed of unlimited time to find out who was behind the bomb and how the Decepticons had gotten a foothold aboard the Lost Light.  All he had to do was figure out how to stop it from going off.

Given the very nature of the Autobot crew as survivors of a four million year civil war, it was inevitable that there were a number of weapons experts aboard. Having already discarded Tailgate as a viable option, Ratchet was trying to decide on the best option when he realized again that the time loop meant he could try all of them.

“Brawn,” he sent, and the first round was off.

The Lost Light’s resident demolitions expert had a temper as explosive as the materials he worked with, and he was not inclined to listen to Ratchet.

 _And why are you the one trying to give me orders?_ he sent.

“Look,” Ratchet said, trying for patience. “Just look at the coordinates I sent, without telling anyone else.”

_How do I know you’re not –_

“Just do it!” Ratchet growled, and Brawn huffed out a very long sigh.  “Watch out for the motion sensors,” Ratchet added.

 _Ah, that’s a fun trick_ , Brawn sent back. _How do you know it’s got motion sensors?_

“That’s a very, very long story.”  Ratchet was standing directly below the bomb, looking at the ceiling and continuing to ignore pings from First Aid and now Rodimus. Brawn came into view at the end of the corridor.

“It’s up there?” he asked.

“Yep.” The bomb did not, at this point, make Ratchet precisely nervous, but it was a little unnerving.

Brawn swarmed up into the ceiling, a safe distance from the motion detectors. _You know it’s jacked into the engines, right?_

“How so?” Ratchet asked.

 _Well._ The sound of buttons being pressed and wires scraping along each other filled the channel for a few moments. _When a certain set of parameters is met, the bomb goes off. Probably._

“Of course it does,” Ratchet said.

 _The simplest way to handle this is usually to disconnect it._ The sound of scraping wires got louder, and before Ratchet could tell Brawn not to pull the wires out, the apparently inevitable explosion sent him right back to his hab suite.

“Pit-spawned strut-licking slagging piece of scrap,” Ratchet muttered at the ceiling, and went to try again.

Brawn got three more tries before Ratchet concluded that he was unable to disarm the bomb. Deftwing, Landmine, Cosmos, and Boss were similarly useless, and Boss alerted Ultra Magnus on his last round.  Ratchet spent the remainder of that loop in the storage closet, until another explosion sent him back to the start.

Using Trailbreaker’s force field to contain the bomb didn’t work out too well, either.

“You want me to do what?” Trailbreaker said, staring down at Ratchet with a rather bemused expression.

“Contain a bomb,” Ratchet said shortly.  Trailbreaker was _not_ following him down the hall, and it was very frustrating.

“There’s a chain of command who ought to be informed,” Trailbreaker said.

“There isn’t time,” Ratchet told him. “We need to go. Right now. People are going to _die_.” He couldn’t quite summon the sense of urgency that should have saturated that last statement; no one was actually going to die, or at least not permanently, and it came out full of irritation and frustration instead. 

Trailbreaker gave him a very dubious look. “Have you told Rodimus?”

Ratchet resisted the urge to bang his head against the nearest wall. Trailbreaker finally agreed to crawl into the ceiling, informing Rodimus about the imminent danger to the ship as he did so. The alarm claxon sounded, and Ratchet followed Trailbreaker into the vents.

“It’s jacked into the ship,” Trailbreaker said, having gone entirely the wrong direction.

“I know,” Ratchet said. “Other way. Now. Go.”

Shooting him yet another highly dubious look, Trailbreaker headed through the vents toward the current bane of Ratchet’s existence. “And why do you know that?”

“Trailbreaker, buddy, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”  There wasn’t room for both of them to crouch side by side when they reached the innocent-looking box; Ratchet peered over Trailbreaker’s shoulder as best he could.

“You want me to encase it in a force field while you deliberately set it off,” Trailbreaker said finally.

“I want you to encase it in a force field while I cut the wires in case it goes off,” Ratchet said.

“Rodimus wants us to wait.”

Ratchet hadn’t heard that particular transmission, which meant that Ultra Magnus had gotten involved once again and had clearly decided Ratchet might be playing a role in bomb placement. “Fine time for him to start channeling Red Alert,” Ratchet muttered.

“Who, Rodimus?” Trailbreaker asked.

“Ultra Magnus,” Ratchet replied. “Would you shield the bomb, please? It’s making me very nervous.”

There was no reason the bomb should be able to penetrate Trailbreaker’s force field, Ratchet reasoned; it was a brilliant piece of technology able to stand up to extreme pressure.

“Okay, okay,” Trailbreaker said, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

The force field was capable of withstanding the explosion; the problem was that it registered on the motion detectors, and rather than containing the blast, the field simply redirected it.  Trailbreaker and Ratchet were thrown through the ceiling by the edges of the blast, landing in a dazed heap on the floor, bare seconds before the starboard engine caught fire.

The alarm cut off, dying in mid-scream with a little whine as the entire ship trembled, and Ratchet could hear the engineering crew desperately trying to bleed off the rising pressure before something catastrophic happened. He couldn’t move, half pinned beneath Trailbreaker, half immobilized by errors in his motor relays, and when the engine went critical, it was almost a relief.

Thumping his head against his berth in renewed frustration, Ratchet decided it was time for his last resort. It did, he felt, require a face to face interaction.

“You can’t have the briefcase,” Brainstorm said when Ratchet showed up in his lab.

“I don’t want the briefcase,” Ratchet retorted, his voice sharper than he’d intended. First Aid was pinging his comms – no doubt due to Ratchet’s failure to show up for his shift – but he didn’t have time to explain what he was doing.

“And you’ve still got bits of my project lodged under your plating,” Brainstorm continued.

“I do not,” Ratchet said, watching control over the conversation slip away.  “How would you even – I don’t want to know. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Whatever,” Brainstorm said. “I’m going to need all the pieces back.”

“You can have them back, but I have a question first.”

“Oh, goody.” Brainstorm finally turned around to face him, wrists bare of any semblance of briefcase. “I love questions.”

“How do I stop a bomb from going off?”

Brainstorm regarded him for a moment, expression rendered unreadable by not only the mask but by his motionless optics as well. “I’m going to assume,” he said finally, “that you don’t mean stop it by conventional means, or you wouldn’t be asking me.”

Ratchet raised an optic ridge and reeled off the methods of disarming the bomb that hadn’t worked.

“This is a rhetorical question, of course,” Brainstorm said in response to the list.  “Or you would have already spoken to both Rodimus and Ultra Magnus about potentially dangerous explosives on board the ship. Near _my_ lab.”

“Rhetorical,” Ratchet said. “Right.”

“If it were me,” Brainstorm said, “I’d just reduce the size of the explosion.”

“Reduce the size of the explosion,” Ratchet said flatly. “How do you expect I do that?”

Brainstorm produced what could only be called a gun for lack of any other properly descriptive term with a flourish. “Mass displacement!”

Ratchet blinked. Blinked again. Made a grab for the gun. Brainstorm held it out of reach. 

“I thought you said it was rhetorical,” he said.

“ _You_ said rhetorical,” Ratchet retorted, making another grab.

“Is there a bomb on this ship? Is there a bomb on this ship and you didn’t tell me? I find that terribly irresponsible, Ratchet. You know what I’m working on in here – well, you _don’t_ know what I’m working on in here, which is the point. But an uncontrolled explosion could be catastrophic.”  Brainstorm’s optics narrowed.

“In which case this is exactly the wrong environment for your research, the which you knew before coming on board.” A faint rumbling sound from several decks away – Smokescreen’s prank, right on time – underscored his words.  Ratchet crossed his arms across his chest, and cocked his head to the side as the vibration diminished into nothing.

“Point.” Brainstorm looked at him for a few seconds and then tossed him the gun. “This might not work, you know. I’ve never tried displacing energy before.”

Ratchet, who had nearly failed to catch the gun, simply nodded. “Thanks.”

First Aid’s pings were becoming more insistent; Ratchet sent him a terse message informing him of his unavailability for the remainder of the shift, which led to inter-Autobot radio messages.

 _What are you doing? Are you all right?_ First Aid sounded, understandably, somewhat frazzled.

“You’re in charge today,” Ratchet replied, finally badgered into making a verbal answer. “Have fun.”

 _What do you mean, I’m in charge today. Where are you?_ Relief and irritation both threaded First Aid’s tone.

Ratchet, in the process of climbing into the ceiling near the engines, sent a terse “Busy.” The bomb was exactly where it was supposed to be, and Ratchet stared at it for a moment before eying the mass displacement gun with no small amount of dubiousness. “It’s not like it can get any worse,” he said finally, and fired.

_Not like what can get any worse? Ratchet!_

Ratchet stifled a curse; he’d left the comm line open. The bomb shrank from view and exploded, the flash of light bright enough to overwhelm his primary optics. “Slaggit,” he muttered, locking the mass displacement gun before putting it in a storage compartment, and the comm line was apparently _still_ open.

 _Okay, I’m coming to you._ First Aid was, apparently, bored, because he was now overreacting.

“Stay right where you are,” Ratchet ground out, trying to reboot his primary optics. He was going to have to replace a few of the relays; they’d been completely burned out.  Until he managed that, his visual acuity was going to be substandard at best, what with the secondary optics not being designed to handle what he was now demanding of them. “Everything is under control.”

The wires were still jacked into the ship, as far as Ratchet could tell. They tapered off weirdly, the effects of the mass displacement gun having diminished as it went along the narrow cylinders.  He didn’t stand a chance now of figuring out exactly what they were doing, but it was now time to hand that specific issue over to someone else.

“Ultra Magnus.”

_Whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait._

That wasn’t the response Ratchet had been expecting. “Some sort of explosive was planted above the starboard engine. It’s been neutralized.”

 _There was a bomb on my ship? A bomb? On_ my _ship?_ That was Rodimus, cutting into the transmission. _Who’s planting explosives on my ship?_

“I’d bet on Decepticons, if I were inclined to gamble,” Ratchet said mildly. “The ones in the brig are probably not particularly trustworthy.”

He remained in the ceiling long enough to point out the bomb’s wiring to Aquafend before heading toward the medibay. He didn’t make it all the way there; Drift intercepted him just as he was about to turn the final corner.

“Ratchet!” Drift’s body language was hard to read, with his primary optics fritzing in and out.

“Drift,” Ratchet returned, suddenly very glad to see the other mech. In trying to disarm the bomb, he’d managed to avoid Drift’s impassioned confession. It struck him that he didn’t quite want to avoid it. 

“What happened to your optics?” Drift asked, and the question was so unexpected that Ratchet could only stare at him for a moment.

“Bomb in the engines,” he returned, and started walking toward the medibay.

“Is anyone else hurt? That needs to be repaired!” Drift ran to catch up.

“No one is injured,” Ratchet said. “And that’s why I’m walking into the medibay. Eventually.” Undergoing repairs for an avoidable injury was not high on his list of desired activities; he wanted – needed – to be involved in keeping the jailed Cons in the brig and the boarding party off the ship. The Lost Light had to have reached the binary system by now, or nearly, and Ratchet didn’t think the Cons would fail to make their move simply because their bomb hadn’t gone off. He needed to talk to Rodimus.

Drift fell in beside him, and Ratchet didn’t need his primary optics to feel the tension in the other mech. “Magnus wants me to keep an optic on you,” Drift said after a moment.

“Of course he does.” Ratchet’s secondary optics sent up an error message, unable to effectively handle the raw data without support from his primary systems. He ignored it in favor of his inter-Autobot radio.  “Rodimus. We have to talk.”

 _This is about the bomb, right? You did good. Stay where you are._ Rodimus closed the channel. Ratchet growled wordlessly.

“Where is he?” he asked Drift.

“Bridge,” Drift said immediately. Ratchet turned down the appropriate corridor, clipping his shoulder against the wall. “I don’t think –“ he started.

“There’s more to this,” Ratchet said. “Rodimus needs to hear it.” Ratchet’s primary optics failed entirely and his secondary optics chose that moment to require a reboot.  He stopped uncertainly, unsure exactly where to go next. Drift’s hand on his elbow guided him gently forward. Ratchet had no choice but to follow, as his secondary optics shut down as well after the failed reboot, but the fact that it was Drift was reassuring. The other mech was a solid presence at his side, generating a surprising sense of safety.

“How did you find the bomb?” Drift asked in a low voice after a few moments.  A noise Ratchet identified as the bridge doors sliding open underscored his words.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Ratchet said, just as quietly. “But there’s something else you should know,” he added, raising his voice.

“Ratchet,” Rodimus said, an odd clang punctuating his voice.

“He just stopped Magnus from moving toward you,” Drift said, nearly subvocally.

“Who else can hear us?” Ratchet asked, just as quietly.

“Clear the bridge. _Now._ ” That was Rodimus again, voice cracking with the authority of command. Ratchet heard several distinct sets of footsteps making for the door, and Drift pulled him carefully aside.  The doors closed behind the bridge crew, filling the room with a profound silence. Rodimus broke it almost immediately.  “I don’t like what I hear, Ratchet. I want an explanation.”

“The information from the Decepticons regarding the moons around the fourth planet is not reliable,” Ratchet returned calmly. “There’s a boarding party waiting outside to reinforce the Decepticons in the brig.”

Heavy footfalls thundered toward him, broken by the scuffle of Drift moving to intercept. Ratchet remained perfectly still, holding onto his composure by the thinnest of threads.

“He burned out his optics, Magnus,” Drift was saying quietly. Ratchet could barely hear him over the struggle.  “He’s not in on whatever it is.”

“Magnus, stop trying to incapacitate my chief medical officer,” Rodimus said, finally taking sides. “Ratchet, I need more of an explanation.”

“I can’t give you one,” Ratchet said, turning to where he thought Rodimus was standing.

“What happened to your optics?” Rodimus asked, finally noticing that something was wrong. “What happened to your _face_?”

“The bomb above the engines had an unwelcome side effect,” he said, tired of answering the question.

“You’re completely blind?”

“Stop waving your hand in front of my face,” Ratchet snapped, making a guess. “I can’t see it.”

“Oh, you just guessed what I’d do,” Rodimus said, and Ratchet flinched hard at Rodimus’ hand touching his jaw. “Sorry,” Rodimus added a little contritely, and the touch vanished.

“You’ve known me for a long time, Rodimus. I can’t explain how I know what I know, but I need you to trust me.” Without his optics, it was almost impossible to gauge Rodimus’ reaction, but Ratchet found the lack of a sudden tackle from Ultra Magnus auspicious.

“Okay, okay.” Ratchet heard Rodimus take a step backwards. “Magnus, move the Lost Light out of the system as quietly as we came in. Drift, take Ratchet back to the medibay to get his optics repaired.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Satisfied that disaster had, for the moment, been averted, Ratchet followed Drift’s guidance back off the bridge. They hadn’t gotten more than half way to the medibay, by Ratchet’s estimation, when Drift paused.  Ratchet came to a halt with him.

“I know this isn’t the time, or the place, but just in case you’re right and something awful happens, there’s something I need to tell you.” Drift had both his hands on Ratchet’s shoulders, the gesture comforting rather than restrictive.

“I already know,” Ratchet said, striving to keep his voice even. He didn’t know if he wanted to let Drift down gently or… his train of thought stalled.

“Then you don’t feel the same – I’m sorry.” Drift’s hands started to pull away and Ratchet reached up to stop him. He missed, grasping only empty air.  Drift caught one hand, holding it awkwardly between them.

“I don’t know how I feel,” Ratchet said honestly, and then ran out of words.

“I can wait,” Drift said. “I just… I wanted you to know.”  He squeezed Ratchet’s hand, and Ratchet returned the pressure.

* * *

“You’ve really managed to damage your optics,” First Aid said.  Ratchet couldn’t feel whatever his subordinate was doing; the first thing First Aid had done was disconnect his tactile sensors.  He could hear the occasional tap and soft scrape, and it was incredibly unnerving.  He tried to focus on the sounds Drift was making instead, as the other mech fidgeted on the other side of the room.

“The next time I accidentally set off a miniature bomb, I’ll remember to look away,” Ratchet said.

“That would be best,” First Aid agreed.  “Better if you avoid the bomb altogether.”

Ratchet wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, but he couldn’t quite suppress the part of him that hoped he’d managed to derail the time loop by stopping the massive explosion.

“This is going to take some time,” First Aid added. “You might want to shut down and recharge while I do it.”

Whether it was due to fear that the time loop had not been broken or simply a reluctance to relinquish control over his own systems, Ratchet didn’t know, but he really didn’t want to shut down. “No,” he said, and he could hear First Aid shrug.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and got to work.

Drift wandered closer while First Aid poked around Ratchet’s optics, eventually resting one hand on Ratchet’s ankle. Ratchet twitched at the contact, prompting a light smack on the part of his head that wasn’t numb.

“Don’t move,” First Aid said. Drift left his hand right where it was.

The tenuous sense of security that had started to creep in was rudely dispelled partway through First Aid’s repairs by the distant sound of blaster fire.

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

"Yes, Captain." Drift's grip tightened until it was almost painful, and Ratchet resisted the urge to pull away. "Understood."

"Well?" he asked, hearing the tell-tale click of communication being severed.

"You stay here." The pressure at Ratchet's ankle vanished and he could hear Drift walking toward the door. He couldn't hear First Aid moving at all.

"That's not enough information!" He'd hoped the lack of an exploding engine would deter the jailbreak, or at least the boarding party. The medibay doors opened and then closed, and Ratchet curled his hands into fists. If he'd had something available to throw after Drift, he would have hurled it. "Leaving the room is dirty fighting!"

 _First Aid, prepare for incoming casualties._ That was Rodimus, broadcasting to all medical personnel via inter-Autobot radio and forestalling any further shouting at the absent Drift.

"Understood. Captain." First Aid was very close to Ratchet's audials, much closer than Ratchet had expected. He shivered slightly, and his tactile sensors switched back on. First Aid's fingers were buried deep in his optics. "We don't have much time, and I need you as functional as possible."

A dozen different responses ran through Ratchet's processor. "Obviously," he finally snapped, and his secondary optics came online.

The input wasn't quite what he'd expected from secondary optics alone; the angles were just slightly off, leaving his peripheral vision severely limited, but his visual acuity was better than it should have been.

"What did you just do?" he demanded.

"I've redirected some of the feeds. The software patch is temporary at best." First Aid managed to look apologetic around the mask, and as well he should. Software patches were the quickest, dirtiest way to get a mech's programming to override potential incompatibilities, and they could cause more errors than they fixed.

"Good thinking," Ratchet told him. If the incoming casualties were anything like they'd been every other time he'd gone through this scenario, a quick software patch was the best solution. He'd deal with any resulting glitches later.

"R-really?"

"Shut up and get ready." Ratchet slid off the berth, wobbling slightly as he readjusted to his altered visual input.

 **This is your captain speaking.**   The comm system broadcast at full volume made them both jump, and only in the brief moment of silence following the first sentence did Ratchet realize that it was Blaster's voice speaking. He was doing a fairly good impression of Rodimus, but it wasn't perfect. In an even slightly noisy environment, it wouldn't have been distinguishable from the real thing. In the still-silent medbay, the attempted deception was obvious.

"That's not-" First Aid started, and Ratchet motioned him to be quiet.

Blaster's announcement continued, the whistling sound of escaping atmosphere keening in the background. **Security teams to deck 3 to repel Decepticon incursion. All other crew members to emergency stations. Hull integrity has been compromised. Do not - I repeat - do not abandon ship.**

"Emergency stations means he wants everyone up on deck 3," First Aid said unnecessarily.

"I know what it means!" Ratchet snapped.

"That was the sound of atmospheric venting." First Aid didn't seem to be able to stop talking, and all he was doing was stating the obvious.

"The brig," Ratchet said. "They're going to break out." The first loop was happening all over again, just in reverse.

"What?" First Aid said, optics flickering in confusion.

Ratchet ignored him, broadcasting desperately as he tried to reach Rodimus, Ultra Magnus, anyone who might be able to keep the Decepticons in the brig down where they were supposed to be. No one answered and the sound of fighting above continued.

"I'll be back," he announced, and the medibay doors rolled open as if he'd activated them.  Ambulon staggered in, supporting an injured Boss.

"You're not leaving," First Aid said, ducking behind Ambulon and taking Smokescreen's limp from from a much less injured Rollout. "And neither are you!" he snapped at Rollout. 

"Later," Rollout said, transformed, and sped down the corridor.

"If they're not stopped, this will get much much worse!"  Despite his words, Ratchet was already pulling Boss's damaged plating aside. Something shifted in his processor and his visual acuity sharpened almost to normal. At the same time, he lost feeling everywhere but his hands. "What did you fragging do to me?" he shouted at First Aid.

"Software patch," First Aid said, and now Ratchet could see well enough to start putting Boss back together. Ambulon was already at another repair berth, hands buried in Sunstreaker's chassis.

If Ratchet walked away, Boss was going to die. If he didn't walk away, who knew how many Autobots could die when the Decepticons broke out? Ratchet snarled wordlessly, unable to abandon the mech in front of him and able only to shout at anyone who could pick up his transmission on inter-Autobot radio to get down to the brig before the Cons turned the entire ship into scrap metal.

Once Boss was stabilized, he was replaced by Powerglide, Tracks, and Deftwing.

"Why am I repairing every single slagging flier we have?" Ratchet muttered, and then Deftwing's main fuel line caught fire. Ratchet cursed again, and he was so focused on trying to keep Deftwing from burning to death that he didn't hear the medibay doors open yet again.

"Stand down," said an unfamiliar voice, but Deftwing's energon was still smoldering, and if Ratchet didn't put it out, it could spread throughout the entire medibay. He kept working. "I said, stand down," the voice repeated, just as the last flicker went up in a curl of smoke, and Deftwing's head exploded.

Ratchet jerked, the words only now registering. "What did you do that for?" he meant to ask, but the words died on his tongue. The mech standing in the door was very clearly a Decepticon, although not one he recognized.

"You will cease wasting resources by repairing Autobot scum immediately." The Con smiled, settling his massive cannon on his shoulder. "Follow me."

With a wordless roar, Ambulon rushed forward. The still-unidentified Con aimed the cannon at Ambulon, cracking open his chest.  Ambulon went down hard, skidding along the floor almost right up to the Decepticon's feet.

"Do as he says, boss," First Aid muttered, and he and Ratchet followed the Decepticon out of the medibay.

The sound of weapons fire still echoed through the deck plating, but the corridors directly outside the medibay were deserted. The Decepticon moved warily, all his attention on the environment and none on the two medics. Ratchet still had a laser scalpel in one hand, jammed hastily underneath his plating when the Decepticon had herded them out the door. He thought he knew where, on that particular model, the spark casing was, and with just a bit of a distraction, how to get through a crack in the Decepticon's armor to pierce it.

First Aid, upon being carefully shown the laser scalpel, tried to take it away. The scuffle was brief and silent, but when First Aid pointed to his eyes, Ratchet surrendered the scalpel. First Aid knew anatomy as well as he did, and would be better able to see his target.

"Hey." Ratchet stopped walking. The Decepticon went for his cannon.

"I told you -" he started, and Ratchet punched him in the face. Or he tried - the software patch on his optics chose that moment to glitch, and the swing went wide enough that it just grazed the Decepticon's cheek. The Con slammed Ratchet against the wall with a hand around his throat, cannon whining as it charged. "We don't need you that badly," he hissed, and then the tip of the laser scalpel burst through his chest plate.

With a look of dull surprise, the Decepticon toppled over, cannon disengaging and powering down.

"Good aim," Ratchet said. His optics glitched again, giving him momentary double vision, before the errors resolved themselves.

"I'm not done." First Aid yanked the spark casing out of the Decepticon's chest and threw it down the hall.

"First Aid," Ratchet started, but he had no idea how to continue. Incapacitating a potential threat was one thing, but killing a helpless mech was another entirely.

"The fighting hasn't stopped," First Aid said, and started toward it. Ratchet let it go; there would be time to address the issue later.

"The brig," Ratchet said instead. "The Decepticons in the brig are part of the boarding party." That wasn't exactly what he'd meant to say.

"They're collaborating with each other?" First Aid said.

"That's the word." Ratchet strode toward the lift. "This was part of the plan from the beginning, starting with the bomb on the engine."

"And you're going to what, stop them from breaking out?" First Aid jogged to catch up. "And why do you think you know what a bunch of renegade Decepticons are planning?"

"I just... I can't explain." The lift wasn't working; Ratchet forced the doors open and started climbing down the shaft. "The prisoners breaking out will end badly."

First Aid muttered something that most likely was less than complimentary. Ratchet ignored it. 

The brig was empty when they reached it, both Landmine and Pointblank prone on the deck just outside. "Pointblank's dead," First Aid said, quietly.

"Landmine, too."

The brig itself had sustained no damage; the doors to the Decepticon cells were just hanging open as if they had been unlocked with the proper code.  "Did you see anything?" First Aid asked, and it took Ratchet a moment to realize that the other mech hadn't been talking to him.

Fortress Maximus nearly filled another cell, hands fastened together with a pair of stasis cuffs. His optics were lit, but he was slumped against the wall.

"Can you speak?" First Aid asked. Ratchet didn't know the code to open the door, and he didn't think First Aid did either, but First Aid was standing right up against the bars, reaching in.  Fort Max didn't answer him.

"What did you see, Max?" Ratchet asked, stepping around Landmine.

Static poured out of Fort Max's vocalizer, and now that he was close enough, Ratchet could see the holes in his plating. No few had penetrated his head, no doubt making a mess of his brain.

"How did the Decepticons get the doors open?" First Aid asked, but the only response was more static.

"I wondered how they got out," Ratchet muttered, stalking around the scene as First Aid tried to get something resembling words from Fortress Maximus. Landmine hadn't fought back against his attacker; the injuries that had caused his death were in the back. He'd bled dry, his spark casing cracked open. Pointblank had his gun in his hands, but as far as Ratchet could tell, he hadn't fired it.

"What are you doing?" First Aid asked, and Ratchet looked up from the barrel of Pointblank's gun.

"They trusted whoever came down here," Ratchet said.

"What makes you think they weren't the ones who opened the cells?" First Aid asked, having apparently given up on Fort Max.

"Please." Ratchet snorted. "Neither one of them would have turned his back on a Decepticon."

"Are you trying to tell me that someone on the Lost Light is, well, a traitor?" First Aid was leaning away, every line of his body expressing shock and revulsion.

"Bomb in the vents. Someone let the Cons out and killed Pointblank and Landmine." Ratchet's optics chose that moment to fritz again, every light flaring with a brilliant halo. "Pit-spawned jury-rigged..." he started, and then he noticed one of the lens flares was coming from the center of the open corridor door.  "Get down!"

The blast went over their heads as Ratchet tackled First Aid to the ground in a tangle of limbs, so close that it singed his plating. First Aid grabbed for Pointblank's gun, but it was just barely out of reach.  Ratchet could see his fingertips brushing against the top of the barrel as the second shot arced out of the darkness.  He shoved First Aid toward Pointblank's body, trying to roll the other way.

The odd bluish-white of blaster fire fritzed out his optics entirely, and Ratchet hit the ground with a jarring thud.  It took far too long for his vision to clear enough for him to see the ceiling of his hab suite.


	6. Chapter 6

"You're trying to go wrong," Ratchet said to the ceiling. "You _want_ the Decepticons to rip you to shreds."

The ceiling, predictably, did not answer. Ratchet glared at it and tried to focus on the positive. He knew how to stop the bomb, and not to try telling Ultra Magnus about it. He was fairly sure he could manage to not burn out his optics this time. Reason dictated that his first action should be to acquire the mass displacement gun and put it to good use.

Unfortunately for Ratchet's sanity, Brainstorm wasn't nearly as cooperative as he had been in the previous loop.

"No, you can't borrow it," he said, hanging from the ceiling.  Ratchet was fairly sure he hadn't been hanging from the ceiling when he'd asked how to disarm the bomb.

"But I -" Ratchet said.

"No."

"Are you using it for something else?" Ratchet asked, forcing his voice to remain more or less even.

"No." Brainstorm was poking at something, the view obscured from the door by his shoulders. He had refused to even turn around, much less detach himself from the ceiling. Ratchet wasn't about to ask what he was doing upside-down, either.

"Then why -"

"It's mine." Smoke started rising from the table, and Brainstorm cursed. "Now look what you made me do."

"This is a matter of -" Ratchet started again.

"If you get Rodimus in here telling me to give it to you, then fine. Otherwise, you can't have it."  The smoke started changing colors. Ratchet backed out of the door before something actually exploded and considered attempting to recruit Rodimus.

With no other real options making themselves immediately known, Ratchet made the case to his captain. Unfortunately, Rodimus assumed he was trying to play some sort of prank, laughed hysterically, and told him to keep working on it.

"I hate you all," Ratchet said to the empty corridor, which was of course the precise moment Drift approached him from behind.

There had been a time that Ratchet would never have responded to an unexpected sound in his personal space by trying to punch the source. That time was buried long in the past, and his fist was flying through the air before his processors caught up with his reflexes.

Drift was better at dodging unexpected objects than Ratchet was at hitting them; he sidestepped smoothly and caught Ratchet before he overbalanced.

"Sorry, I see now isn't a good time," he said, withdrawing his hands reluctantly.

"Oh, no, now is the perfect time. The starboard engine is about to explode, the Decepticons in the bridge are about to have inside help in breaking out, and to top it all off, they'll be joined by reinforcements coming from the planet we're about to visit. Before half the crew dies horribly and the ship is boarded or possibly destroyed is the perfect time for anything!" Ratchet was shouting by the end of the speech, all of his frustration spilling out.

"Um." Drift blinked. "Are... are you all right?" he asked cautiously.

"Oh, I'm fine. Absolutely fine. In fact, once everything goes to the Pit and back, I'll get to watch it happen again. And again. Everything is going fantastically well." Ratchet stalked down the hall, absentmindedly checking his internal chronometer against the timestamp for the bomb to go off.  The fact that his chronometer wasn't working only threw him a little.

There was a very brief moment of silence from Drift before the other mech jogged to catch up. Ratchet ignored him. "You know that sounds a little crazy, right?" Drift said after a few moments.

"I know exactly how it sounds."

Drift was silent for another few moments. "Given the oddness of your statement," he said, "I would feel a great deal more comfortable if we had First Aid take a look at you."

"And I'd feel a great deal more comfortable if I didn't know the engine was about to explode." Ratchet wasn't about to let First Aid start mucking around in his processor; with his luck, that would just restart the loop. Then again, he might have better luck getting the mass displacement gun if he just tried to steal it to begin with.

"Well, yes," Drift started.

"Do you want to see the bomb?" Ratchet rounded on him, shoving a finger into Drift's chest plating. "It's a lovely piece of work, expertly wired right into the Lost Light's systems."

"Since Tailgate is our resident bomb disposal expert," Drift said, and Ratchet cut him off again.

"That didn't work. Every time he got near it, it exploded."

"You're serious." Drift regarded him seriously. "You're telling me you've... you've lived this day before."

"That's one way of putting it." Ratchet started walking again.

"That's..." Drift hesitated. "You have to know how that sounds," he said again.

"You were about to tell me that Rodimus is making the announcement that we have a lead on the Circle of Light. Then you were about to tell me that you feel more for me than friendship." Some of the ire slipped out of Ratchet's voice at the end; Drift was the last mech he wanted to antagonize, at least partly because Drift hadn't done anything remarkably idiotic throughout the various repetitions of the day.

"How did you know that?" Drift said, apparently on autopilot, because he blinked as soon as the words left his mouth. "Of course. If you're stuck in some kind of... of loop, we've had this conversation before."

"Well," Ratchet said. "Not specifically this conversation."

"You didn't tell me before?" Drift asked, sounding curious and not at all dubious or disbelieving.

"It didn't really come up- look, we have bigger things to worry about." Brainstorm's lab was right around the corner.

"Hey," Drift said, and Ratchet glanced over. "You know you can tell me anything, right?"

Ratchet wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. "Aren't you going to ask how I reacted?" he said instead, and then wished he could pull the words back.

"You didn't reciprocate," Drift said with a little half-smile. "Or you would have told me about the time loop earlier. But you're not freaked out, either, or you wouldn't be talking to me now. You've probably heard this before, but I'll take what I can get, and I'd rather be your friend than not have you in my life at all."

"I," Ratchet started, and then didn't know how to continue.

"What are we doing outside Brainstorm's lab?" Drift asked, making an obvious bid to change the subject.

"Mass displacement gun," Ratchet said. "The only way I've found to stop the bomb is to shrink it."

"Huh," Drift said. "Not bad."

A little curl of warmth wound itself around Ratchet's spark at the praise. "We're going to borrow the gun," he said, trying to quash the feeling. "I need you to distract Brainstorm."

"Why wouldn't you just ask?" Drift asked.

"I did." Ratchet approached the door from the side, eyeing the corridor for potential illicit cameras. He didn't see any, but that didn't mean that they weren't there or that Brainstorm wasn't hijacking the security feed.

"Ah," Drift said, and walked into the lab. The door shut behind him.  He walked out a few moments later with the mass displacement gun in his hands.  "You know, he's really quite pleasant once you get to know him."

Ratchet, who did know Brainstorm quite well, decided that discretion was in this case the better part of valor and just made a noncommittal noise in response.

"So the bomb," Drift said, when Ratchet made no move to go anywhere.

"I think it's better if you don't go near it," Ratchet said.

"If something happens to me, you can reset the loop," Drift said. "If you die, you don't know that the loop will start over." He paused. "Do you?" he asked hesitantly.

"I don't think I've actually died," Ratchet admitted. "But I still think it's better if I'm the one to-"

"Let me do it," Drift said. "Where is it?"

Ratchet was beginning to reevaluate his opinion on Drift not pulling any stupid stunts. "Follow me."

"A compromise," Drift said, and flashed him an approving smile. Despite himself, Ratchet was pleased.

"That's it, huh?" Drift said from a safe distance. "It doesn't look like much."

"Yeah, you say that now. Wait until it goes off," Ratchet muttered. "Don't look at it when you shrink it."

"Right." Drift aimed, shuttered his optics, and fired.  Even facing the other way, the light of the miniaturized explosion hurt. "Now what?"

"Now we go explain to Rodimus why there was an energy surge above the starboard engine and find out who let the Decepticons out of the brig."  Ratchet dropped out of the ceiling and reached up to give Drift a hand down. Despite not needing the assistance, Drift took his hand and landed lightly beside Ratchet. His normally white armor was singed ever so slightly, giving him a vaguely lopsided appearance.

"Wait, let the Decepticons out of the brig?" Drift asked. "You mean someone on board is working with the Decepticons."

"That's exactly what I mean," Ratchet said grimly, striding toward the bridge.

"And you don't know who it is." Drift fell in beside him.

"No idea." Ratchet had considered just parking himself outside the brig and waiting, but it didn't seem like the wisest of options.

"I'm honored by your trust in me," Drift said finally, and Ratchet realized that he hadn't ever suspected the ex-Decepticon.

"No reason not to trust you," he said.

"If someone is headed to the brig, we should warn Ultra Magnus," Drift said finally. "He's acting director of security."

"That has not historically gone well," Ratchet said. "The first time I warned him about the bomb, he threw me in a storage closet."

"That doesn't seem like Ultra Magnus," Drift said slowly.

"And yet." The question was, then, how to tell Rodimus so that he could handle Ultra Magnus. The question was derailed as Ultra Magnus himself rounded the corner in front of them.

"Unexplained energy readings have been detected in this sector," Ultra Magnus said.

Ratchet just barely stopped himself from looking at Drift. "I haven't seen anything unusual."

"Your plating is scorched," Ultra Magnus said, and looked at them expectantly.

Ratchet couldn't help it; he glanced down. His finish, less durable than Drift's, showed distinct evidence of having been within the bomb’s blast radius. "Malfunctioning arc welder," he said, although he was fairly sure Ultra Magnus wouldn't accept it as an explanation. He was correct.

"Lying to a superior officer is a distinct breach of the Autobot Code," Ultra Magnus said, somehow radiating menace without so much as twitching. Ratchet could hear Drift start to shift into a defensive position, and he could just see the entire encounter going on its merry way to outright violence. That would solve precisely nothing.

"Drift, don't," he said, ignoring Ultra Magnus for the moment and putting a restraining hand on Drift's forearm. "Let Ultra Magnus escort me to Rodimus."

Ultra Magnus blinked. To his credit, Drift recovered just a fraction of a second more quickly, and he was adept enough to go along with the vague cover story that would let at least one of them still move freely. "Ultra Magnus, if you would assist me in escorting Ratchet to the captain, he has some explaining to do."

On the other hand, Drift wasn’t taking the hint to leave Ratchet to his fate and go do something concrete about the developing situation in the brig.

"That is acceptable," Ultra Magnus said, after hesitating just a little too long.

The bridge wasn't that far away, but when Ratchet turned toward it, Ultra Magnus guided him down another corridor.  Drift, already several steps in the wrong direction, ran to catch up. Ultra Magnus slapped a control panel on the wall, closing one of the emergency blast doors just before Drift could reach them.

"What are you doing?" Ratchet asked.

"The Autobot Code has been violated," Ultra Magnus said, and refused to speak again. 

Ratchet, in the process of being all but dragged down the corridor, tried to comm Pointblank and Landmine and warn them of a potential assault, but Ultra Magnus was blocking his inter-Autobot radio.

"Ultra Magnus," he started, and broke off when the grip on his upper arm tightened enough to leave dents in his plating. The tableau only got more surreal when Rodimus appeared at the end of the corridor.

"I'll handle this, Magnus," Rodimus said softly.

There was a whirring sound as Ultra Magnus' vocalizer failed to initialize and the pressure on Ratchet lessened slightly.

"Magnus," Rodimus said again.

"As acting director of security, handling potential internal threats falls under my jurisdiction," Ultra Magnus said.

"Ratchet is not a potential internal threat!" Rodimus threw his hands in the air, somehow managing to combine a sense of utter frustration with confidence and control of the situation. "Honestly, Magnus, of all the mechs on board."

"I found him near the coordinates of an unexplained energy surge with his plating scorched," Ultra Magnus said, a faint tinge of pleading in his voice. "Drift had already taken him into custody."

"I've spoken to Drift," Rodimus said. "Let go of Ratchet."

Some of the tension radiating through Ultra Magnus' frame abruptly eased.  "Yes, sir," he said, and gave Ratchet a little push toward Rodimus.

Ratchet stumbled slightly, righting himself just in time to see Ultra Magnus vanish down a side corridor.

"Okay, now would you please explain what is happening on board my ship?" Rodimus demanded, his fearless leader impression vanishing to be replaced with a confused and frazzled mech.  "Drift said something about a bomb above the starboard engine."

"Um." Ratchet's processor was overclocking in an attempt to boil down an explanation that he could give Rodimus without mentioning time loops. "It was in the ceiling," he finally said, lamely. "We, uh, borrowed Brainstorm's mass displacement gun to shrink it."

"It didn't occur to you to, oh, _disarm it_ ," Rodimus said, veering sharply into sarcastic territory.

Ratchet stomped on the automatic retort that he had very well tried to disarm it, thank you, and it had gone off in his face every time. "Reducing the impact of the potential explosion seemed like a safer alternative," he said instead.

"You know we have a _bomb disposal expert_. Explosives experts. We have people on board who are _trained_ to deal with these things," Rodimus said.

"Well. Yes." It was hard not to squirm under that look; it was the one he had given his shipmates countless times, the one that said _why don't you just do the reasonable thing, it would make this so much easier_. "About that."

"Did it explode? Of course it did. I can see the burn marks on your finish from here. And on Drift, which means the two of you went to go contain an explosive without notifying me. Or Ultra Magnus." Rodimus tacked on the last as an afterthought. "So that means that you found it, and went to Drift."

Ratchet wasn't sure whether or not Rodimus' perspicacity was well-timed or not. "Something like that?" he offered. Control of the situation had well and truly escaped him.

"And at some point, you borrowed an experimental device which may or may not have undiscovered side effects to contain an unknown explosive," Rodimus continued.

"Ye-es?" Ratchet said.

"Primus, Ratchet, could you at least pretend to follow protocol?"

Ratchet could only stare. That wasn't quite the reaction he had been expecting.

"I'll handle this," Rodimus said firmly. "I don't suppose you could tell me exactly how you managed to find the bomb. Unless you've made it a habit to crawl around in the ceiling without me noticing."

"Stray wire coming out of the ceiling," Ratchet said. Part of him wanted to let Rodimus handle the traitor and the Decepticons and the rest of it, but Rodimus didn't have all the information and he didn't think his captain would be quite as accepting of the time loop story as Drift had been.

Rodimus nodded. "Okay. I've got it from here. If I recall correctly, you're late for a shift in the medibay."

"The Decepticons in the brig -" Ratchet started, and the deck plating shook violently underneath their feet.

"That was the brig," Rodimus said, and took off at a dead run. Ratchet had barely a moment to wonder how exactly Rodimus knew that before he found himself racing after the other mech.


	7. Chapter 7

Having lost sight of Rodimus two decks prior, Ratchet skidded around the final corner in the desperate hope that he was in time. The sight that met his optics froze him to the ground, paralyzed and unable to react.

Rodimus had reached the brig before the Decepticons had been released, although the bulkheads surrounding Fortress Maximus' cell had been blown to pieces, and Fort Max himself was sprawled underneath the debris with half his head missing. Landmine was part of the wreckage, spark chamber exposed and dark. Pointblank lay face down and unmoving in front of a still-locked door.

Ratchet took in these minor details with just the barest thread of attention at the back of his mind; they were background trivialities, the things that weren't really important. What he couldn't process was the fight still raging, Ultra Magnus' massive hands gripping Rodimus by the throat.

"Why won't you just die?" Ultra Magnus roared, and Rodimus shot him in the face. Magnus' grip loosened and Rodimus kicked his way free. Ultra Magnus stumbled backwards and Rodimus landed heavily on the ground.  One leg damaged and sparking, he scrambled upright.

"Sound the general alarm," he said, half of the syllables lost in the static of a severely damaged vocalizer. "Now, Ratchet!"

The seconds it took to speak cost him the fight. Ultra Magnus reached through his spinal strut from behind and tore out his spark chamber. The sight of the light in Rodimus' optics fading finally freed Ratchet from his paralysis, but it was too late.

The trigger to sound the alarm was on the wall just outside the brig. Ratchet's fingers barely brushed it before Ultra Magnus ripped his arm from its socket and used it as a club. Ratchet slid down the hall, everything shrinking down to a single imperative: warn the crew. Ultra Magnus threw the arm aside and stalked slowly toward him. There was no sense of urgency, nothing that said he considered Ratchet a threat.

Despite himself, Ratchet felt a small flare of indignation that Ultra Magnus thought so little of his resilience. There was another alarm trigger behind him and around the corner.  Ratchet threw himself to the side and forced a transformation, sliding on three wheels toward the wall.

"I don't think so," Ultra Magnus said, and his hand closed around Ratchet's rear tire. Pain flared as it was crushed, and then Ultra Magnus slammed him against the nearest bulkhead. Ratchet's vision whited out briefly, his optics coming back online as his battered t-cog shook him toward root mode.

"Why?" he ground out, pushing himself backwards. He was nearly at the intersection, nearly at the alarm trigger.

"Why," Ultra Magnus repeated, and something in him shifted. He stood staring, as if at a loss for words. Ratchet took the unexpected opportunity and ran with it. This time the protective cover over the trigger shattered under his hands and the emergency sirens flared to life.

The sound jolted Ultra Magnus out of his apparent indecision. He stepped forward, and the last thing Ratchet saw was his huge hand before the ceiling of his hab suite stared at him mockingly.

"What," he said to it, trying to parse the fact the Ultra Magnus had apparently just murdered him.

Either Rodimus was complicit in freeing the Decepticons, or Ultra Magnus had gone off the deep end.  Ratchet tapped his fingers against his berth, not particularly happy with either option.

It was, he supposed, vaguely possible that Rodimus had decided that the quest had stalled out and that they all needed something to rally around, at which point he had concluded that the Decepticons in the brig would be a fantastic team-building exercise. In that case, Ultra Magnus would have come upon him trying to open the brig, and then assumed that Ratchet was part of the plan. Ratchet had, after all, found the bomb in the vents.

"Now you're just being ridiculous," he said to the ceiling, but the other option was that Ultra Magnus had let the Decepticons out and started a coup. "Not that that’s any less ridiculous."

Of all the mechs Ratchet had ever known, Ultra Magnus was the least likely to perpetrate acts of illegality.

"Unless, of course, he's snapped entirely." Ratchet blinked at ceiling, climbed to his feet, and then strode down the corridor to the brig. He pinged First Aid to tell him that he would not be in the medibay, closing the channel on First Aid's inquiry as to why, exactly, Ratchet was avoiding his shift.

Pointblank and Landmine were both on duty, what with the shift having just changed. Ratchet ordered them out, glaring them into submission when Pointblank raised a token protest. Ratchet gave the Decepticons a considering look once he was alone in the brig with them, but none of them met his eyes.  None of them appeared interested in the small power scuffle, although Ratchet knew better.

"Ratchet?" Fortress Maximus said. Ratchet shook his head.

"Not now." He paced back and forth, rehearsing and discarding what he could say to deflect Rodimus, or deflect Ultra Magnus, whichever of them showed up.

 _Why don't you just go to Drift with this_? came a doubting voice from his subconscious. He told it to shut up; he needed proof before he accused either the captain or the second in command of what amounted to treason, particularly before involving Drift.

The sound of a distant part of the ship shaking itself apart pulled Ratchet's thoughts back, and he groaned aloud. He'd somehow managed to completely forget about the bomb in the engines, and it had gone off right on schedule.  Ratchet cursed, and one of the Decepticons laughed.

"Worse is coming, little Autobot," he said, hands sliding across the wall.

Ratchet ignored him. First Aid was frantically trying to raise him, telling him that the starboard engine had malfunctioned and that casualties were coming into the medibay. Ratchet cut off his comm-line altogether, staring at the door.

More time than Ratchet had expected passed before Ultra Magnus stepped through it, pausing when he saw Ratchet waiting with his arms folded across his chest.

"What are you doing here?" Ratchet asked, still hoping that he was somehow wrong.

"I think that's my line," Ultra Magnus countered smoothly. "There is a crisis. You should be in the medibay."

"Why are you here?" Ratchet repeated.

"I really hoped it wouldn't come to this, but I can’t have you interfere," Ultra Magnus said, and all doubts vanished. Ratchet backed away, trying to put himself out of reach, but he'd forgotten how fast Ultra Magnus was. "I'm sorry," Ultra Magnus added, barely audible through the shrieking pain, and Ratchet found himself back in his hab suite.

"That went less than well," he said to the ceiling, echoes of Ultra Magnus' hands ghosting across his chassis. No part of it made sense, when any part at all involved the Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord letting war criminals out of the brig and murdering his fellow shipmates. "How could he..."

Ratchet trailed off, unable to put his thoughts to words. Confusion and dismay and uncertainty warred for the forefront, slowly but surely burned off by an increasing sense of righteous fury.

"How dare he," Ratchet said, almost experimentally. The words sounded right, _felt_ right. "How _dare_ he," he said again, more forcefully, the anger swelling up inside him finding its way into his voice. He stormed through the corridors, wrath pushing down the more reasonable parts of his mind, pushing away the need to ask questions and find solutions. The only thought he permitted himself was that he was going to grab the Second in Command and shake the answers out of him.

The bridge doors sliding apart came as almost anticlimactic.  Ratchet pushed past them before they'd fully opened. "Ultra Magnus!" he roared.

"Uh, Ratchet?" It was Rodimus who answered. "What -"

"Not you," Ratchet snarled, pointing over Rodimus’ shoulder. "Him."

Ultra Magnus, in contrast to the rest of the bridge crew, did not seem surprised by Ratchet's precipitous entrance. His face was set in its usual expression, grim and somewhat forbidding. "Can I help you?" he said frostily, wielding courtesy like a blunt weapon as only Ultra Magnus could.

"Tell me why you did it!" Ratchet spat, advancing on the much larger mech. Something clanged against his chestplate, and he looked down in surprise to see Rodimus' hand. "Get out of my way, Rodimus."

"Okay, let's all calm down for a minute," Rodimus said.

"I will not be calm! Not until he explains the hell he put me through! Put us all through!" Ratchet tried to shove Rodimus' arm aside, only to be met with the rest of Rodimus himself physically holding him back.

"Okay, the rest of you back off," Rodimus said, just as Drift burst through the doors brandishing the twin swords that usually hung on his hips. "Slaggitall, Drift, stand down!"

The distraction was almost enough for Ratchet to shove his way past Rodimus, but the captain yanked him back by the wrist before Ratchet could get more than half a step forward.

"Everything is his fault!" Ratchet shouted, his last hold on rationality breaking down. "The invasion, the breakout, all the dead are piled at his feet! He's the one who started all of it! Every time!"

"Everybody off the bridge," Rodimus said, pitching his voice over Ratchet's increasingly incoherent screaming as he worked his way from the engines exploding and the resulting casualties through the breakout and Rodimus' death at Ultra Magnus' hands.

He'd just gotten to Drift dying on the table in front of him when Rodimus' full-armed open-handed slap across his face nearly unhinged his jaw.

"I said calm down!" Rodimus said, and Ratchet realized that Drift was pinning his arms behind his back and Rodimus' other hand was nearly denting his chestplates in an attempt to hold him in one place. Ultra Magnus himself was staring at the tableau in front of him, normal expression replaced by something almost calculating that vanished as soon as he realized that Ratchet was looking at him.

"I have no idea what he's talking about," Ultra Magnus said, his quiet even voice a surely deliberate contrast to Ratchet's screaming. Ratchet hated him just a little more for it. "None of the events to which he is referring appear to have taken place."

"Not yet," Ratchet hissed, optics narrowed. "But they will. Just wait. In less than an hour, the starboard engines will explode. Only they won't do it on their own, no, there's a bomb in the vents. Go look, if you don't believe me, but don't get too close, because it's surrounded by motion detectors and primed to go off if it's discovered."

"Um." Rodimus blinked. "Okay. There is something clearly wrong here."

"Of course there is!" Ratchet said, relieved that Rodimus was finally at least going to look into the matter.

"Drift, please escort Ratchet to the medibay and inform First Aid of the situation," Rodimus continued, right on top of Ratchet's words.

"No!" Ratchet struggled, trying to pull free of Drift's grip. "Why won't you just listen? I don't care if you don't believe me, just listen, just look, all you have to do is look, it's there! The bomb is there! He's going to let the Decepticons out of the brig, Rodimus!"

"Come on, Ratchet," Drift said. "Don't make this any harder than it has to be."

"He's going to get half of us killed!" With a final heave, Ratchet pulled one arm free and turned toward Ultra Magnus.

"Sorry," Drift might have muttered, just before everything flashed into blackness and faded into the white of Ratchet's hab suite ceiling.

The anger drained away slowly as Ratchet finally forced himself into something resembling equilibrium, replaced with cold fury. First things first, he had to ensure that the engines wouldn't explode. Pointing out that it was there to what passed as the proper authorities aboard the Lost Light had done him little good in the past and wasn't likely to help his case now. Following that, he needed to incapacitate Ultra Magnus without arousing suspicion so that he could be interrogated and the jailbreak derailed.

Ratchet wasn't quite sure how he was going to manage the latter, but a vague plan was better than no plan at all.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

Ratchet was at Brainstorm's lab requesting the mass displacement gun before he remembered that the direct approach hadn't gone well the last time. It was therefore somewhat to his surprise when Brainstorm shrugged and handed him the weapon.

"Try not to wreck anything important," he said. "And bring it back in one piece."

"I'll bring it back in the same condition it's in now," Ratchet said, poking experimentally at the gun.

"See that you do." Brainstorm was giving him a rather unreadable look, what with the mask hiding most of his face and his optics shaded in an odd way.

The miniaturized bomb flashed brilliantly as it went off, Ratchet looking fixedly in the other direction to keep his optics from burning out again. A shuddering boom somewhere above his head made him flinch, until he remembered Smokescreen and Perceptor, and he reached the medibay just as Perceptor came walking in.

"I'll take care of it," he told First Aid.

"You weren't answering the comm," First Aid said, optics flicking between him and Perceptor calmly hanging onto his own arm.

"I know," Ratchet said. "Perceptor, if you please."

"Is there something I should know about?" First Aid followed him over to the repair berth, reaching out to deactivate Perceptor's sensory circuits as Ratchet set the arm aside and clamped down on the leaking lines.

"No," Ratchet said. "Tell Smokescreen that I will have his plating for decorative wallpaper if he does something like this again."

That got the tiniest flash of a smile out of Perceptor. "I will," he said.

"What?" First Aid stared at both of them, hands unmoving on Perceptor's chest.

"Smokescreen's bored," Ratchet said by way of explanation. Judging from First Aid’s expression, it wasn’t adequate. "Hand me the arm, please."

First Aid eyed both of them rather dubiously throughout the rest of the repairs, which ended with Perceptor flexing his newly repaired arm and his sensory circuits reactivated.

First Aid had cleaned out the gashes on Perceptor's chest while Ratchet worked on the arm, and he now stood wiping off his hands with a damp towel.

"Thank you," Perceptor said, and left to presumably throw everyone out of his lab and conduct the repairs on his own.

"Well?" First Aid said, staring at Ratchet over a repair berth growing tacky with drying energon.

"Well, what?" Ratchet asked.

"No one said anything about Smokescreen," First Aid said.

"I want you to act as CMO for the upcoming incident," Ratchet said, and the expression on First Aid's face was comical, faceplate or no faceplate.

"You're making no sense whatsoever," First Aid complained, thoroughly distracted from his previous line of questioning. "What incident?"

"Rodimus will make the announcement later today," Ratchet said.

"He's not going to announce an incident," First Aid muttered.

"You've met Rodimus," Ratchet said. "You know as well as I do there's going to be some sort of disaster."

"You're still making - wait, you want me to be in charge?" First Aid twitched slightly, the words apparently only then sinking in.

"You know the procedure, you know the protocols. I'll tell Hoist and Ambulon about the temporary change." Ratchet smiled. This time, he had things under control. This time, First Aid would be in the medibay handling any potential casualties.  This time, there would be no breakout, no exploding engines. Everything was going to go right. "Go get some rest before this afternoon," he added.

The medibay was silent after First Aid left. Ratchet stared at the walls, unseeing, the anger he'd felt at Ultra Magnus' betrayal only now coming back to the forefront. He tapped his fingers on the still-sticky repair berth, considering various alternatives, and finally commed Sunstreaker.

"What do you mean I have to come down there?" Sunstreaker complained. "There's nothing wrong with me."

"Just do it," Ratchet said, and despite his whining, Sunstreaker walked through the door a few minutes later in a truly impressive sulk. His pet was at his heels, chittering away.

"Up here." Ratchet patted the newly cleaned berth.

With a resentful glare, Sunstreaker complied. Ratchet ran through the list of questions he'd asked on the first loop, which Sunstreaker answered just as irritably as he had the first time.

"And lie down, please," Ratchet said mildly.

"This isn't supposed to be until tomorrow," Sunstreaker said, but he was following instructions. "I've got a duty shift to complete."

"I have a few concerns," Ratchet said, connecting a diagnostic line to the back of Sunstreaker's neck.

"What do you mean, concerns?" Sunstreaker pushed himself up on one elbow.

"Lie down." Ratchet initiated an external shut-down and Sunstreaker went limp. Bob leapt up on the table, nudging at Sunstreaker. "He'll be fine," Ratchet said to the Insecticon. It gave him a narrow-opticked look, clearly unimpressed. Contingencies out of the way, Ratchet made sure the temporary stasis would hold and then moved on to the second phase.

"Ultra Magnus," he sent. "Please report to the medibay. I have reason to believe Strain 5 is reasserting itself."

There was, of course, some argument. Ultra Magnus had been one of the few who hadn't been affected by the rust virus - or at least, he'd been one of the least affected, despite his exposure - and he wasn't pleased that Ratchet wanted him to submit to an examination immediately.

"The command staff is my first priority," Ratchet told him, to which Ultra Magnus wanted to know why Rodimus had yet to be contacted. "Because he'll argue with me," Ratchet said sharply. "And you're the least likely to suffer a relapse, which gets you out of here more quickly, and do I have to tell you why it's a good thing to have at least one officer up and around?"

 _I'll inform Rodimus and Drift they're to report to the medibay upon my departure_ , Magnus sent gravely, and shut off the comm. He stalked through the door a few moments later, posture imposing and rigid, every line of his frame declaring that he was in control.  Ratchet motioned to the open berth farthest from the door, leading him right past the unconscious Sunstreaker. 

"Over here," he said unnecessarily, and followed the SiC.

"Standard physical exam?" Ultra Magnus said, giving him a measuring look.

"Not quite," Ratchet said.  He inserted the diagnostic cable, executing the external shutdown as quickly as he could. Ultra Magnus fought it, but there was something not quite right with his coding and he went into stasis more quickly than Ratchet had expected.

Ultra Magnus being offline only solved one problem, however; while the jailbreak probably wouldn't happen with the perpetrator out of commission, the question of why exactly Ultra Magnus of all mechs would let the Decepticons out of the brig was still pressing. Ratchet was still staring down at the offline SiC, wondering what exactly to do next, when Drift walked in the door.

"Is there something I should know about?" he asked, and Ratchet nearly climbed the walls. He'd been so preoccupied he hadn't heard the doors opening, and Drift had startled him badly.

"No?" he said, once he'd convinced his madly hammering fuel pump that it had no need to lodge itself in his vocalizer.

"Right," Drift said, optics flicking between him and Ultra Magnus. "Because the second in command is in stasis in the medibay for no reason that I need to know about." He glanced to the side. "And Sunstreaker. Who was fine when he started his duty shift this morning. I know, because I saw him. I spoke to him. His aura was clean."

"It's not - there's - I told him Strain 5," Ratchet finished somewhat lamely. His vocalizer wasn't cooperating.

"The rust virus?" Drift asked, optics shuttering on and off. "Was there a relapse? Do we need a quarantine?"

"No, no, no." Ratchet held up his hands. "No need for that. There are extenuating circumstances."

Drift was giving him a very level look, and Ratchet was far more flustered by it than he had any right to be. "Extenuating circumstances," Drift said slowly, and something in his optics changed.

"It's a very long story. Not quite what it looks like." Ratchet found himself shifting his feet.

"I was going to tell you that Rodimus is making an announcement regarding a new lead," Drift said. "New sector. Thought you might like to know in case we ran into something unexpected."

"Well, it is Rodimus," Ratchet offered, mouth on autopilot. "Unexpected, disastrous, one and the same, happens all the time."

"You seem to have taken the initiative with unexpected," Drift said, and at some point he'd gotten right into Ratchet's personal space.

"About that," Ratchet said.

"That wasn't the only reason I came in here," Drift continued, and now he was way too close. Ratchet could have reached out and touched him by barely flicking a finger, but it didn't even occur to him to move away. The jittery nervousness had vanished, replaced by a flicker of something very like hope.

"I know," he said, looking ever so slightly up to meet Drift's optics.

That was what broke Drift's composure, just a little, and he froze.  "What?" he said.

"It's a very, very long story." Ratchet closed the gap, reaching carefully up to put both hands on Drift's shoulders, and Drift shivered. "But I know why you’re here. I know what you wanted to say. And yes. The answer is yes. But not right now. There's something I have to do first."

The expression on Drift's face was nothing short of poleaxed. His mouth worked for a second, but the only word he got out was another "What?"

Ratchet squeezed gently and then let go, making for the medibay doors. "Rodimus?" he said through the comms. "I need to talk to you. Right now."

Without waiting for an answer, he strode down the hallway. It only took a few steps for Drift to catch up. "A long story," he said.

"Yes." Ratchet stroked the side of Drift's arm briefly. "A very long story."

"I look forward to hearing it," Drift said. "Is there a reason you're scurrying to Rodimus like your aft's on fire?"

"Yes," Ratchet said, and then Drift's choice of words registered. "I am not scurrying," he said indignantly.

"Eh," Drift said, mouth twitching in what couldn't quite be called a smile.

"You're far too pleased," Ratchet told him, which only made the smile wide enough to actually be termed one.

The conversation with Rodimus went much less well.

"What do you mean, there's going to be a boarding party?" Rodimus demanded, looking back and forth between the two of them as if they'd presented him with some nutjob conspiracy. "Drift, what's he talking about?"

"I have no idea," Drift said, throwing Ratchet right under the bus.

"I don't exactly have time to explain," Ratchet said. "The new lead? The one we're chasing down? It's a trap. There was going to be a jailbreak. That probably won't happen, but you might want extra security down there anyway. The Decepticons waiting for us will probably still try to board the ship, but at least the engines won't explode."

"Ratchet, you're making absolutely no sense." Rodimus glanced between him and Drift. "He's not making sense, is he?"

"Not so much, no." For all of his words, Drift was still standing right next to him, as if they were presenting Rodimus with a united front.

"And you would say this because...?" Rodimus asked.

"I can't explain right now," Ratchet said. "But when we stop, there will be Decepticons waiting."

"Paranoia is such an ugly word," Rodimus began.

"I am not paranoid!" Ratchet snapped, cutting him off. "First Aid is going to be acting as CMO for following three duty shifts, by the way," he said into the resulting silence. That was the reason he'd gone to see Rodimus on the first loop, after all, and it was part of standard protocol to inform the captain of any staffing changes.  Not that he was trying to distract Rodimus or anything.

"Well, that's." Rodimus blinked. "Okay, fine, that's good. Good to know. I still want to know why you think there are going to be Decepticons and how you heard the announcement I was going to make before I actually made it."

"Very long story," Ratchet said. "No time. We're nearly there."

Right on cue, the vibration in the deckplates ceased as the main engines shut down.

"We're moving into position, then," Drift said. "We might want to inform the crew."

"Ratchet, please return to the medibay," Rodimus said. "Drift, with me. We're going to talk about this later. And where's Ultra Magnus?"

"Incapacitated," Ratchet said hastily. "An issue came up during a routine exam this morning." Now was not the time to explain that Ultra Magnus had let the Decepticons out of the brig in the first place, not with Rodimus giving him that look.

"Of course he is," Rodimus said, and then shook his head. "We are going to have to have a very long conversation about this."

With any luck, Ratchet wouldn't have to explain too much about the time loop. With any luck, there wouldn't be another loop, although why solving the problem of the ship being taken over by Decepticons would solve the problem of a repeating day made no reasonable sense.

"Understood," he said to Rodimus and ducked out into the corridor. Rodimus' voice crackled out of the speakers a moment later, informing the crew of the new lead and where they'd gone to track it down.

First Aid was in the medibay when Ratchet returned, looking at Ultra Magnus and Sunstreaker with an almost comically dismayed expression.

"What are you doing? What's going on? I leave for a few hours and you've - what's even wrong with them? Nothing is wrong with either of them!"

"Sunstreaker can go," Ratchet said, reaching around the Insecticon to unplug the mech in question.

"You're acting very strangely," First Aid said.

"It's almost over," Ratchet replied, watching Sunstreaker closely. His optics lit up, prompting a new wave of chittering from Bob. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

Sunstreaker was not happy about the morning he'd spent unconscious, for which Ratchet couldn't blame him. First Aid's optics tracking him all around the medibay as he prepared for potential incoming casualties didn't quite help with his mood, either, but none of it dented the completely irrational hope he felt at the potential end of the looping.

"I don't know what you're even getting ready for," First Aid said, and Ratchet just shook his head.

"You're still in charge," Ratchet said. "Act like it."

"Fine, put that down." First Aid motioned toward the tray of clamps Ratchet was placing next to an open berth for no apparent reason whatsoever. "Leave it alone. We can handle any incoming casualties as they come in."

"Whatever you say."

"Explain to me why you have Ultra Magnus in completely unnecessary stasis," First Aid said.

"Can't yet." Ratchet drummed his fingers on the empty berth next to Ultra Magnus. Explanations would have to come later; if the Decepticons were going to attack the ship despite its engines not exploding and their cohorts in the brig not wreaking havoc, they were going to do it soon.

"What do you mean, yet?" First Aid said. The Lost Light shuddered around them, underscoring his words. "What was that?"

"Decepticons," Ratchet said grimly.

"How do you know?" First Aid asked, but his question was drowned out by Siren's voice on the ship-wide comms ordering the crew to battle stations. "You have got to be kidding me," he muttered.

"Isn't there something you want to say?" Ratchet said.

"Uh, prepare for incoming casualties?" First Aid said.

"Good," Ratchet told him.

He wasn't expecting the influx of injuries they'd had the first loop, or even any of the other loops where he'd been in the medibay for the Decepticon activity, and he wasn't disappointed. Not many injured came through the doors, and those that did were fairly easily treated. Neither Ambulon nor Hoist even had to be called in for extra assistance.

The worst of the casualties was Drift, with burns across his torso and a gash down one leg leaking at an alarming rate. He was leaning heavily on Blaster, who was himself liberally coated in drying energon. Ratchet took over Drift, lifting him gently onto an open berth, while First Aid looked over Blaster's comparatively minor injuries.

"What were you even doing?" Ratchet asked. No one else had come in with signs of hand-to-hand combat.

"Nothing," Drift muttered, tense under Ratchet's hands. "Leave my sensory circuits alone."

"The Decepticons broke through the hull on Deck 5," Blaster said, grinning widely. "Drift held them off single-handedly."

"Most of the fighting was on Deck 6," Drift said. "Rodimus handled it."

"Uh huh," Ratchet said, clamping down the line. Drift flinched. "And is he coming down here?" he asked, trying to distract the other mech.

"Wasn't even scratched," Drift said. The leaking hadn't stopped, and Ratchet went looking for the other severed lines that had to be there. Drift shivered under his hands.

"I'm going to turn off the sensory circuits here," Ratchet said.

"Leave them alone." Drift grabbed his wrist, holding it tightly enough to dent. "Leave them alone."

"Okay, okay." Ratchet pried Drift's fingers off. "We're nearly done." He was nowhere near finished, but Drift held himself perfectly still until the damaged lines had been patched. The burns were a little easier, although they had to have been more painful than the leg; Drift's armor had been nearly melted through in two separate places.

"How did you know?" he asked suddenly.

"I told you, it's a long story." Ratchet pried the last of the damaged plating free, checking underneath for signs of injury. Drift's internals, exposed as they now were, at least appeared to be fine.

"I think you're just trying to get out of telling it." Drift didn't seem to be after an answer, despite his words; his optics were shuttered.

"How many more?" Ratchet asked First Aid. Drift's plating would have to be repaired, but that wasn't urgent.

First Aid shook his head. "Fighting's over, no one else is inbound. Tracks is the last of it."

The flier in question was wearing a very disgruntled expression, staring down at a no-longer-mangled wrist. "Barbarians," he muttered, not quite softly enough to not be heard.

"We're just about done," First Aid said. "You can go."

Ratchet glanced around; there had been zero fatalities and most of the wounded had been sent back to either their quarters to recuperate or their duty stations to get back to work.

"Drift," he said.

"I have to stay?" Drift peered down at himself. "I'd rather not."

"I want you off that leg for the rest of the night, and I'd rather you stayed here until I can replace your plating."  Ratchet gave Drift another once-over, but he’d done all he could for the moment.

"No, no, I'm good." Drift swung his legs over the side of the berth.

"Stay down." Ratchet didn't want to actually push him back down, but he didn't think Drift would actually listen. To his surprise, Drift stayed on the berth. The moment lasted until Drift looked behind him and then planted both feet on the floor. He didn't quite overbalance, but the majority of his weight was on the uninjured leg.

Ratchet sighed and turned around. "Rodimus."

"Okay," Rodimus said. There was very little of his paint visible, what with the soot and energon covering his frame. His face was untouched, though, and his mouth was set in a hard line. "I want to know exactly what's going on, and I want to know right now."

Ratchet considered for half a second, and then told him. Rodimus tried to interrupt before he'd gotten more than four sentences in, somewhere around the first time Ratchet said the words _time loop_ , but Ratchet just kept talking and the interruptions subsided. Halfway through the recitation, Drift sank back down on the berth with a slight wince.

"After I incapacitated Ultra Magnus, I went to your office," Ratchet said. "You've been through the rest."

Rodimus stared at him for a moment before audibly resetting his vocalizer. "I'm not sure what to say," he said.

"That's a first." Ratchet couldn't stop the words from coming out, and Rodimus' face settled into distinct lines of anger.

"The only reason I'm not throwing you in the brig," Rodimus said, "is because I've known you for a very long time. And also because Aquafend reported signs of an explosion in the ducts above the engine, well before the Decepticons attacked the ship."

"You can ask Ultra Magnus," Ratchet said. "He might tell you the truth."

"Let's do that," Rodimus said.

Ultra Magnus came out of stasis swinging.  Ratchet ducked, pulling Drift to the side, but Rodimus wasn't quite as quick. Ultra Magnus latched onto his throat and lifted him into the air.

"What do you think you're doing?" Rodimus choked out. Ultra Magnus growled, squeezing harder.

"Okay. Clearly we have a problem." Rodimus pulled up both legs and kicked his second in command in the throat. Ultra Magnus stumbled back, his grip loosening, and Drift slammed into his side. It did no good; Drift bounced right back off, going down hard.

Rodimus pulled free, knocking Magnus' hand aside and pointing a blaster right between his optics.

"Back off," he growled. Ultra Magnus lunged for him again, both fists flying, and Rodimus shot him in the face.  Ultra Magnus dropped, shaking his head, and Ratchet jacked the diagnostic cable right back in. Ultra Magnus was back in stasis in under a second.

"Give me a hand here," Ratchet said, and between the two of them, he and Rodimus managed to heave Ultra Magnus back onto the berth without dislodging the diagnostic cable.

"Make sure he stays unconscious," Rodimus said coldly. "I'll handle him later."

"There's something else going on here," Ratchet said. "This isn't like Ultra Magnus."

"Ratchet's right." Drift had climbed shakily to his feet and was now leaning surreptitiously on the nearest repair berth that wasn't full of unconscious Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord. "This isn't normal behavior."

"Clearly," Rodimus said. "And I'm not going to deal with him now. Or with you,” he added, rounding on Ratchet. “You just... stay out of trouble. Don't do anything stupid. Drift, keep an eye on him." He turned on his heel and stalked away. "Don't touch him until I say so!" he shouted back over his shoulder. "He stays right where he is!"

Ratchet looked between the closing door and the stasis-locked Ultra Magnus and finally settled on Drift. "Let's get you back over to your berth," he said, and Drift transferred his weight from the table to Ratchet.

"This is not what I had in mind this morning," he said quietly, shaking with what turned out to be only slightly hysterical laughter.

"It never is," Ratchet said, and Drift leaned into him.

"Don't make me stay here," he said, and his expression made something in Ratchet twist painfully.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go."

Drift got steadier as they went down the corridor, not leaning on Ratchet quite so much. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"Your quarters?" Ratchet wasn't prepared for the question. "You're the one who wanted to leave."

"Swerve's," Drift said, nudging Ratchet down the appropriate corridor.

"Are you sure?"

"It's time for the Hey, We're Not Dead party," Drift said, and when they walked through the doors, he was proved more or less right. Swerve's was packed.

"Okay, standing around is not going to help," Ratchet said quietly. "Your self-repair systems aren’t going to function properly if you keep putting weight on the damaged lines."

The standing part turned out not to be a problem; Drift's entrance into the bar garnered a round of applause and an open table. Ratchet deposited him onto a chair with a sense of disgruntlement and a feeling that leaving Drift in the medibay would have been the better choice after all, regardless of how wide-opticked and pathetic Drift's expression had been.

"So," Ratchet said finally, pushing whatever it was Drift had ordered across the table. It wasn't that he'd had to fight his way through the crowd that made him uncomfortable, specifically, or the air of almost quiet desperation underlying the manic hyperactivity in the room. He couldn't quite put his finger on it.

"So," Drift agreed, picking up his drink and taking a sip.  The silvery lines under where his plating should have been gleamed almost obscenely in the dim light. "Time loop."

"Not fun," Ratchet said.

"So when you said you knew why I came to see you this morning." Drift shifted in his chair. That bit of the story had not been part of what he'd told Rodimus.

"Yes," Ratchet said, and Drift nodded.

"How many times?" he asked curiously.

Ratchet shrugged. "I'm not sure. I stopped counting."

"Then how do you know it's over?"

"I don't, because I don't know how it started," Ratchet said. "Shouldn't it be, though? The Lost Light is safe. No one is dead."

"The Decepticons have been thwarted," Drift added, a small smile curling his lips.

"That too," Ratchet agreed, and an uncomfortable silence filled the little bubble of space around them.

"What I meant was, how many times did you tell me?" Drift asked, breaking it.

"Once." Ratchet sipped his own drink to avoid meeting Drift's optics.

"Only once?"

"You were the only one who believed me," Ratchet told him softly.

"It's kind of a crazy story," Drift said. Ratchet didn't have to give him a verbal answer to that one. Drift shrugged and grinned cheekily, the discomfort gone. He reached across the table to gently brush his fingers over Ratchet's hand.

Ratchet returned the gesture, lacing his fingers into Drift's and tracing the seams on Drift's wrist with his thumb.

“We should go,” Drift said softly, and rose to his feet. This time, as they walked down the corridors, his proximity to Ratchet had a completely different insinuation, one that Ratchet had no intention of indulging. His resolution lasted until Drift palmed open the door of Ratchet’s hab suite, nothing about his gait or his hands unsteady at all.

Drift paused, just over the threshold and fingers just starting to slip underneath Ratchet’s plating to the sensitive wires beneath, to ask if Ratchet was sure.  Ratchet’s answer was nonverbal and decidedly positive, and it was the last word either of them spoke in the dark behind the now-closed door.

Ratchet onlined again to the bright white of his hab suite ceiling and no Drift. He frowned, looking around, but there was no sign the other mech had been there. He hadn’t woken when Drift had left, either, despite the two of them having been tangled together when Ratchet had slipped into recharge the night before.

“Full points for stealthy,” he muttered, and debated comming Drift for all of half a second. “It’s not polite to just leave like that,” he sent, a playful edge to the words.

 _Excuse me?_ Drift sent back.

“I just woke up,” Ratchet said. “Wondered where you were.”

 _I’m in my hab suite,_ Drift sent, the transmission thick with wary confusion. _Why do you ask?_

Ratchet frowned, wondering if he’d been misreading Drift. It didn’t seem likely, given his behavior throughout the loop. “After last night?” he said. “Most mechs would stick around.” Another thought occurred to him, one that was surprisingly distressing. “Unless you were just after a one night stand.”

Silence for a moment, and then _I have no idea what you’re talking about_ , Drift sent. _I saw you for thirty seconds in the corridor yesterday. We barely spoke._

“No,” Ratchet whispered, as he finally realized what must have happened. He checked his internal chronometer for the date, but it was offline. “Drift,” he said urgently, hoping he was somehow wrong. “Tell me what day it is.”

Still confused, still wary, and now almost hostile, Drift told him. Ratchet thanked him numbly and broke the connection. The loop had restarted.


	9. Chapter 9

It didn’t matter what he did, or didn’t do. The loop just kept going, kept circling around. Whether or not Ratchet tried to stop the sabotage, save lives, prevent Ultra Magnus from his incredibly uncharacteristic attempt to foment anarchy, nothing changed.

The comm system pinged – First Aid trying to reach him. Ratchet ignored it in favor of staring at the ceiling. It was a familiar ceiling, brightly lit and paneled. There were a few worn corners here and there, vague irregularities that he’d never paid attention to before.

The pings progressed to actual words, none of which actually registered. After a few minutes, Ratchet disabled his comm. Three corners he could see were shadowed slightly by a failure in the lighting system to evenly spread the illumination, and for a few moments, Ratchet watched the soft edges of the shadows. They didn’t move.

The silence was broken an indeterminate time later by actual physical pounding on his door. It started out soft and almost polite, but after a few minutes it actually vibrated the bulkhead. The shadows in the corner shivered slightly, and for a moment it looked as though they would spread to cover the ceiling.

 _Optical illusions_ , Ratchet thought, and the door slid open. _Remote override_ , a corner of his mind supplied. _Magnus must have authorized the code._ It wouldn’t have been Rodimus; Ratchet doubted Rodimus knew the override codes existed. No, that wasn’t a fair assessment. Rodimus was pretty good at predicting his crew, and he’d know how to break into a locked room.

“Ratchet!” Apparently First Aid had sent Ambulon; the former Decepticon was now within Ratchet’s field of view. Not that it made any difference; Ratchet didn’t acknowledge him in any way. It wasn’t worth it. “Ratchet?”

He could see Ambulon’s face now, and it was worried. Ratchet dialed down his audio receptors as much as he could, and Ambulon’s voice fell to a muted buzz. He felt Ambulon’s hand on his shoulder, trying to elicit some kind of response, but that meant no more than anything else. There was a panel just barely visible past Ambulon’s face, and Ratchet couldn’t tell if there was a gap along its edge or just a line of deeper shadow.

Ambulon moved closer and the tile was obscured. Ratchet let his optics go offline and cut his motor relays. He wasn’t going to deal with any of it, not when nothing he did had any tangible result. No one who died would stay dead, or remember that they had died, or the pain they had suffered. No one but Ratchet.

Maybe if he ignored it, it would just go away.

A vague sense of motion surrounded him, hands on his plating, and then stillness. Ratchet withdrew into it, the total lack of sensation weirdly comforting, and then an electric shock coursed through his systems. Foreign code forced his optics and audials to reboot, and First Aid’s visor and face mask hovered way too far inside his personal space.

“Ratchet!” he said, and it was loud and raw and undeniably full of life and for the briefest of moments Ratchet hated him for it before the feeling drained away again. First Aid withdrew, turning to – presumably – Ambulon.

There was a brief conversation before Ratchet felt the foreign code once again worming its way through his CPU and initiating a forced reboot. The world fell away, to be replaced once again by the ceiling of his hab suite and its comfortingly irregular ceiling panels.

“This is ridiculous,” he said to it. “You know this is ridiculous.”

The ceiling, predictably, didn’t answer. Out of morbid curiosity, Ratchet queried his internal chronometer. As it had been since the entire fiasco had started, it was offline. He asked the Lost Light’s computer instead, which verified that the loop had restarted.

“Fine,” he told the computer, which whirred and clicked and told him that his input could not be verified. “The loop restarts every time I shut down? I have a solution for that.”  The computer informed him that his verbal query could not be processed, which was more or less irrelevant. If shutting down was what reset the loop, Ratchet could fix it by simply not shutting down.

* * *

Brainstorm proved recalcitrant when it came to asking him for the mass displacement gun, but Ratchet hit upon the method of suggesting Brainstorm accompany him to the site of the explosive to test exactly how well the gun worked on something that insisted on blowing up at the slightest provocation. Brainstorm gave him a considering look and clipped the briefcase to his wrist before following Ratchet into the ceiling.

“Don’t look at it,” Ratchet warned him, and Brainstorm scoffed.  He did, however, turn away before miniaturizing and then setting off the bomb above the engines.

“That’s fascinating,” he said. “What made you think to try this approach?”

“Trial and error,” Ratchet said, and Brainstorm gave him a humorless chuckle. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to incapacitate our second in command before he lets the Decepticons out of the brig and tries to murder the crew.”

“You’re having a fascinating day so far,” Brinstorm said.

“You have no idea.”

Ratchet didn’t bother dragging Sunstreaker into the medical bay for verisimilitude this time; he simply called Ultra Magnus down and jacked into his code before he’d gotten more than a foot in the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” First Aid asked, having come running at the sound of Ultra Magnus crashing to the floor.

“Give me a hand here,” Ratchet said. He’d barely reached the medibay before Ultra Magnus had gotten there, and First Aid was still covering the first part of what was technically Ratchet’s shift. “He’s heavy.”

“That’s Ultra Magnus! What do you think you’re doing with Ultra Magnus?”

“It’s a very long story,” Ratchet said, “and he needs to remain in stasis for the forseeable future. I have to talk to Rodimus.”

“I’ll say you do,” First Aid said, but he helped Ratchet haul the unconscious Ultra Magnus onto a repair berth and strap him down. “By the way,” he added.

“Perceptor?” Ratchet guessed.

“There was an incident in Perce- hey, how’d you know?”

Ratchet pointed at the door, which was still closed. He frowned. It was just about time for Perceptor to come walking in carrying his own arm.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” First Aid said, just as the door finally slid aside to reveal a rather disgruntled Perceptor.

“Take care of that, please,” Ratchet said, and went off to find Rodimus.

The Lost Light’s fearless leader was lurking in the corridor between his quarters and the bridge, trying to raise Ultra Magnus on the comms.

“He’s in the medibay,” Ratchet said, and explained the ambush.

“Now is not the time for you to develop a sense of humor,” Rodimus said.

“Aren’t you lucky I’m not joking. Can we stop racing toward an ambush now?”

Rodimus eyed him with consternation and stalked toward the bridge. “Full stop,” he said through the open door and then returned to Ratchet. “Explain.”

“How far are we from the binary system?” Ratchet asked.

“Far enough,” Rodimus said. “Now I want an explanation.”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Ratchet started to turn away; if there wasn’t going to be a fight, he had an examination to conduct.  Rodimus grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back around.

“I think you need to tell me,” Rodimus said.

“I need you to trust me, Rodimus.”

“The fact that we’re not going toward the first solid lead we’ve had, ever, should prove how much I’m trusting you,” Rodimus said. “I think it’s your turn to return the favor.”

The worst that could possibly happen was that Rodimus would throw him in the brig, revive Ultra Magnus, and get the ship destroyed, at which point the loop would likely restart. On the other hand, the best that could possibly happen was that Rodimus would believe him, the examination would turn up an explanation for Ultra Magnus’ bizarre behavior, and the loop would eventually restart.

“Would you care to accompany me to the medibay,” Ratchet said, and Rodimus narrowed his eyes. His expression didn’t get any less skeptical as they approached the medibay, either, despite Ratchet’s very clear explanation of events.

“Are you entirely sure it’s Ultra Magnus whose code needs evaluation?” he said, not quietly enough that Ratchet couldn’t hear.

“Yes,” Ratchet snapped, which wasn’t really the right way to win Rodimus over.

“You’re on thin ice,” Rodimus warned him.

“If I’m wrong, you can throw me in the brig,” Ratchet said. “I’ll even go quietly.”

Rodimus laughed at that. “Fine.”

Despite the chuckle, Ratchet was fairly sure Rodimus wasn’t joking. With First Aid’s help – Rodimus’ stipulation, as he wanted a more impartial participant, but at least Rodimus hadn’t insisted on sticking around the medibay to watch the process – he set about trying to figure out what might be causing Ultra Magnus’ aberrant behavior.

There was only so much that could be done while Ultra Magnus was offline, but any physiological inconsistencies were part of what it was possible to find.

Unfortunately for Ratchet’s sanity, Brainstorm had apparently decided that he hadn’t been joking about Ultra Magnus after all, and that Ultra Magnus’ aberrant behavior merited putting his other projects on hold.

“I don’t see what could possibly interest you,” Ratchet muttered. “No part of this is going to explode.”

“You wound me,” Brainstorm replied without missing a beat. “Not everything I work on explodes.”

Ratchet didn’t have anything resembling a polite answer for that one, particularly not with Brainstorm rooting around in Ultra Magnus’ head.

“Nothing looks out of the ordinary,” Brainstorm said after a few moments of silence.

In the process of performing the third least invasive level of scans possible – the first two had turned up nothing, nor had the visual inspection – Ratchet simply frowned. Ultra Magnus’ peculiar physiology merited a closer inspection than Brainstorm was apparently giving him, although it was entirely possible that Brainstorm had simply fallen prey to the myriad miniature attention deflectors and had yet to notice said abnormal physiology.

“What makes you think the reason is physical, anyway?” Brainstorm continued.

“I’m eliminating various possibilities,” Ratchet said.

“You’re hoping you can find something fixable before you wake him up,” Brainstorm said, nodding sagely. “Makes perfect sense.”

Given the difficulty of restraining Ultra Magnus, it wasn’t like Brainstorm was exactly wrong. Ratchet grunted and started on the next level of scans – if something had been injected into Ultra Magnus or if there was a stray piece of hardware floating around anywhere, this would be the one to find it.

“I’m bored,” Brainstorm said, pulling his hands out of Ultra Magnus’ head.

“That’s not my problem,” Ratchet said.

“Problem? Not your problem? Step aside.”

A dozen horrifying visions of what Brainstorm could potentially start doing flashed through Ratchet’s mind – none of them likely to be accurate and none of them likely to wreak even close to the havoc an unsupervised Brainstorm could cause with minimal supplies and no oversight – and he lunged forward to physically remove Brainstorm from the area.

“Hey!” Brainstorm’s briefcase swung around, slamming into the scrape along Ratchet’s side. The unexpected flare of pain caused Ratchet to misstep ever so slightly, arm catching in the chain connecting the briefcase to Brainstorm’s wrist, and the resistance overbalanced both of them. Brainstorm landed right on top of him, briefcase held out protectively, which was the precise moment that the medibay doors slid open.

Ratchet shoved the briefcase aside to meet Drift’s very wide and very startled optics.

“I – “ Drift started, and fled.

“Get _off_ of me, you slag-sucking…” Ratchet shoved Brainstorm aside, the arguably mad scientist laughing too hard to help, and scrambled to his feet.  “Drift, wait!”

The door had shut on his words, but Drift wasn’t moving fast enough that Ratchet couldn’t catch him.

“Sorry I interrupted,” Drift said, optics back to narrow and face frozen in icy courtesy, still walking rapidly in what appeared to be a completely random direction.

“No, no, no, no.” Ratchet shook his head, catching Drift’s wrist. That turned out to be the wrong move.

“Don’t touch me,” Drift said sharply, but at least he stopped walking. The down side was that they were standing in what was usually a major intersection, even if it was temporarily empty.

“That wasn’t what it looked like.”

“Oh?” Drift arched an optic ridge, expression still frosty. “Because it looked like you were engaging in public indecency.”

“I tripped,” Ratchet said, only realizing how ridiculous the words sounded once they were out of his mouth. He was built better than that, had backup systems and stabilizing gyros, and now that it had been drawn to his attention, his side still stung like fire.

“You’ve got a fluid leak,” Drift said, and Ratchet pulled his hand hastily away from the very minor injury.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Happened, uh, yesterday.”

Drift’s optics narrowed further. “You’re not going to get me to feel sorry for you,” he said.

Ratchet’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. “I don’t even know – what do you – what?” he managed finally, and barely stopped himself from asking if that was some sort of Decepticon social ritual.

“Never mind,” Drift said. “Just… never mind. Forget I – forget it.”

Ratchet reached toward him with his left hand, only then noticing that it was smeared with trickles of internal energon. He withdrew it hastily. “I want more from you, too,” he said bluntly. There was no sense in dancing around the issue, after all.

“You what?” Drift said, shock replacing the cold mask, and then “How do you – you do?”

“I do,” Ratchet said, laying the lightest of touches on Drift’s shoulder with his clean hand. “I’ll see you at Swerve’s tonight, okay?”

“I – yeah. Yeah, okay.” Drift smiled, bright and joyful, and Ratchet grinned back. 


	10. Chapter 10

Brainstorm had moved on to Ultra Magnus’ torso when Ratchet returned to the medibay. “Now, come look at this,” he said, waving distractedly with one hand.  “Does that look right to you?”

“It looks perfectly normal,” Ratchet told him upon inspection, the brief flare of hope that Brainstorm had found something significant flickering out.

“But you don’t,” Brainstorm said, finally turning around. “You’re leaking.”

“Yes, yes,” Ratchet said. The scan hadn’t turned anything up after all, Brainstorm’s interference notwithstanding, but it had quite a ways yet to go. “Self-repair will-“

“I want my stuff back,” Brainstorm interrupted.

“Your what?” Ratchet blinked before remembering that he’d borrowed the mass displacement gun to take care of the bomb, and although Brainstorm had actually pulled the trigger, Ratchet had subspaced the weapon and then forgotten about it. He pulled it out of his internal compartment and proffered it. “Right. Here you go.”

Brainstorm looked at the gun as though he had no idea what it was or why Ratchet was trying to hand it over. “No-o-o,” he finally said, drawing out the single syllable.

Ratchet started to lower his hand, now thoroughly confused. “I don’t have anything else of yours.”

“Well, of course you don’t _have_ it,” Brainstorm said, snatching the mass displacement gun and stowing it before Ratchet’s hand had sunk more than a few degrees. He stepped in closer and reached for the open scrape down Ratchet’s side. “It’s in there.”

For perhaps half a second, Ratchet tried to find a polite and diplomatic way to tell his crewmate that he was completely out of his fragging mind before remembering that the mech standing in front of him was Brainstorm. “You’re completely out of your fragging mind,” he said flatly, trying to step out of reach.

“No, no, there are still bits stuck in there,” Brainstorm said, deftly following him.

“Bits of _what_?” Ratchet snapped.

“Yesterday.” Brainstorm stopped chasing and Ratchet glared at him from the other side of an empty recharge slab. “Remember? You and Rodimus smashed my – well, you smashed it.”

Yesterday as far as the rest of the ship was concerned was so far back Ratchet had to dredge up the memory.  “Oh, that,” he said, and then the rest of what Brainstorm had said caught up with him. “Stuck in _where_?”

“Under your dermal plating,” Brainstorm said, far too cheerfully. “Could be dangerous, being stuck in there.”

“You’re not filling me with confidence here,” Ratchet muttered. “What exactly were you working on?” he asked in a louder voice.

“Oh, this and that.” Brainstorm’s voice had something of a brittle cheerfulness to it, and he was sidling toward Ratchet again.  “Let me just extract it before it does anything. Probably nothing. Well, I don’t think there should be side effects. There might not. It shouldn’t be that far under your dermal plating.”

As if on cue, Ratchet’s side twinged and started throbbing. “Oh, fine. Just do it.”

Having his internals – even the most superficial layer – exposed before what one might charitably term a mad scientist wasn’t exactly the most calming experience. Brainstorm’s continued mutterings didn’t help, either.

“Well, look at that, I think it started growing,” he said at one point, or at least Ratchet was fairly sure that was what he had said.

“What do you mean, growing?” he asked, which got him nothing more than a light smack and an exhortation to stay still.

“I think that’s all of it” came as music to his audials, as Brainstorm set a disturbingly organic-looking set of filaments on top of a growing pile on the formerly clean recharge slab. Ratchet peered down at his side; now that the foreign matter had been removed, his lines had sealed themselves off with alacrity, and the dull throbbing he’d completely forgotten about after the first few loops was gone entirely.

“Growing?” he said again, but Brainstorm had gathered up the entire feathery pile and vanished with it. Ratchet muttered imprecations too quietly for anyone else to hear, made an internal note to remember to clean it out himself the next time the loop reset, and went back to the examination of Ultra Magnus.

Some time later, Ratchet reflected that if Ultra Magnus had been a smaller mech, it wouldn’t have taken nearly as long to find the knock-off cerebro-shell nestled inside his main control unit. Not having had direct experience with them, Ratchet couldn’t be sure that the small spidery bit of machinery was one of the objects that had been reported to have been employed by the Decepticon Bombshell, but it seemed like a safe bet.

“Let’s get that thing out of you,” he said softly, which was much easier said than done. A report had to go off to Rodimus, and Ultra Magnus’ operating software had to be debugged once all the tiny little filaments had been extracted, and by the time Ratchet realized that he’d stood Drift up, the red and white mech was standing in the doorway with one optic ridge raised.

“How long have you been there?” Ratchet asked somewhat belatedly. He’d left Ultra Magnus to recover during the final defrag session, leaving Rodimus a note that he’d be reviving the SiC in a few hours, and it then had occurred to him that he might be a little late meeting Drift. It was at that point that he’d seen the other leaning on the door frame.

“Have you been in here all night?” Drift countered, a caustic edge to his tone.  

“Um.” Ratchet blinked. “Is that how- what time is it?”

“You,” Drift said, and then paused. The hostility drained out of his stance. “You really _have_ been in here all night. Isn’t your internal chronometer working?”

“No,” Ratchet said. “I had no idea what time it was. I’m sorry.”

Drift shook his head. “I was furious,” he said. “I thought you were playing the worst kind of joke.”

“No, I just… I lost track of time,” Ratchet said, a sinking feeling in his tanks. He couldn’t have handled Drift worse if he’d tried, and the last thing he wanted was for things to go poorly.

“If literally anyone else said that, I would call him a liar.” Drift pushed himself gracefully off the doorframe and stalked toward him.

“Look, I’m sorry.” Ratchet said again. “There’s no excuse-“

“No, no, it’s – it’s not fine, but I accept the apology.” A small smile played around Drift’s lips. “Care to make it up to me now?”

“Swerve’s it is,” Ratchet agreed, relieved that he hadn’t managed to ruin matters entirely.

“Yeah, okay.” Drift laid a casual hand on Ratchet’s elbow and led him toward the door. “Not quite what I had in mind, but okay.”

“Not quite –“ The lack of recharge was starting to cause minor errors in Ratchet’s processor; nothing he couldn’t handle, but a few subroutines were running more slowly than usual, and it took him a moment to catch Drift’s meaning. “Oh,” he said.

“You really have been working all night,” Drift said, and now he was laughing. “I guess that’s something I should get used to.”

“Oh, probably,” Ratchet said more waspishly than he’d intended.

“I can take a rain check,” Drift said, words belied by the tightening grip on Ratchet’s arm. “You should –“

“No,” Ratchet interrupted. “Out of the question.” They were just around the corner from Swerve’s anyway.

The bar was more or less empty, which wasn’t unexpected, given the hour. Swerve himself was absent, and a cheerful Tailgate was manning the bar itself. Ratchet had been bracing himself for snarky commentary and was nonplussed by the genuinely friendly greeting, causing Drift to start laughing again.

“I’m glad I bring you joy,” he said over the glass of theoretically non-intoxicating mid-grade. Appropriate fuel would reduce potential errors in his subroutines, since he wasn’t going to let this loop reset itself.

“You bring me so much more than that,” Drift said, and any further sarcasm Ratchet might have offered died a quiet death unspoken.

“Yeah, well,” he managed in response, and buried his face in his glass.

“You never did explain how you knew what I was going to say,” Drift said.

“About that.” Ratchet found himself oddly reluctant to explain the time loops, even though Drift had accepted the events before. “Call it a hunch,” he said finally.

“You don’t believe in hunches,” Drift pointed out.

“I believe in observation,” Ratchet shot back, and Drift twitched.

“Was I that obvious?” he murmured.

“Not that obvious,” Ratchet admitted. “But what I want from you is what I hope you want from me.”

“And what’s that?” Drift asked.

“I want to spend tomorrow with you,” Ratchet said, reaching out to cover Drift’s hand with his. “Every tomorrow I can see from here.”

That got him another one of Drift’s beautiful smiles, brilliant enough to light the entire room.

* * *

The internal alarm Ratchet had set for the time Ultra Magnus was set to be revived went off, making him jump slightly.

“What was that?” Drift asked. He wasn’t quite close enough to feel the twitch, but he’d certainly seen it.

“I have to get back to work.” Ratchet pushed himself to his feet; he’d had enough energon to compensate for most of the minor errors cropping up in his processor, but he could feel the fatigue starting to creep in. He ignored it. The time loop could go frag itself; he wasn’t going to let it win.

“Ah.” Drift followed him into the corridor. “I’ll, uh, see you later, then.”

“Yeah.” Ratchet smiled back, and headed for the medibay. He didn’t get more than a few steps before the ship’s klaxons started blaring the pattern for external attack. Battle protocols washed away any sense of exhaustion and Ratchet started running.

Siren’s voice sounded over the loudspeakers, instructing the crew to report to emergency stations.

“Where are you going?” Drift snapped, his optics bright with the fight or flight response.

“Toward the Decepticons,” Ratchet snapped back.

“You don’t know who-“ Drift said, and then shut up. “Stay behind me.”

“I’ve been part of this war just as long as you have,” Ratchet said, and then they rounded a corner directly in the firing line of the same Decepticon shock troopers who’d boarded the ship during every single loop.

“Get down!” Drift threw Ratchet toward the ground and rolled the other way, narrowly avoiding a burst of laser fire.

“Drift!” came a friendly voice, and Ratchet saw Rodimus arrive on the scene, enthusiastically plowing into the Decepticons from behind. The fight degenerated from there, more Lost Light crew members flinging themselves with what could only be called wild abandon toward the group of enemy combatants.

Ratchet dragged an injured Fizzle out of the middle of the fray, patching up the worst of his severed lines and directing him to report to the medibay for proper treatment, followed by Jetstorm and then Rollout. None of them – not one! – followed instruction, instead choosing to get right back into what was more of a brawl than a proper battle.

“Idiots,” Ratchet muttered, but the fight was nearly over. No one had been too badly damaged; he might even have gone as far as claiming that the worst injuries were due to Lost Light crewmembers literally running over their shipmates in order to get to the Decepticons. It would have been an inaccurate claim, but there it was. He had been fairly sure the entirety of the crew complement was composed of hot-blooded idiots, and now he had proof.

Eleven of the twelve Decepticons who’d teleported aboard were down and apparently incapacitated; no few of them were leaking badly.  Ratchet moved through the wounded, and if he disengaged motor relays while treating the aggressors, no one was going to fault him for it. Drift had migrated to the other side of the startlingly broad combat area, securing one of the Decepticons who wasn’t particularly damaged.  Ratchet watched for a moment in amusement as Drift had to wade through Autobots actually sitting on their opponent to keep him in place.

Not far away, Rodimus was still shouting at the leader of the Decepticons, who was posturing right back, as they geared up for a highly dramatic final showdown. Ratchet ignored them both; Rodimus had plenty of backup.

 _Ratchet?_ came over his comm line.

“First Aid,” he returned.

_We’ve got casualties in the medibay from the four infiltration attempts. Where are you?_

“There were four attempts?” Ratchet asked. “I’m on location for one of the four. No serious injuries.”

 _Make that five infiltration attempts, then._ There was a shuffling noise from the comm line. _Nothing particularly life-threatening in here yet. Probably._

“I’ll be right there.” Ratchet gave the corridor another once-over, just to make sure everything was in hand. Rodimus had the Decepticon leader more or less subdued – he was in his element, dramatically shouting threats and imprecations – half of the boarding party was in the process of being hauled away, and a Decepticon with a disturbingly large cannon was pointing it directly at Drift.

“Traitor!” the Decepticon howled. The distinctive whine of a directed energy weapon grew louder and the tip of the barrel began to glow. Drift started to turn, swinging a blade into place to deflect the blow in one of the most useless gestures Ratchet had ever seen.

Ratchet moved with barely a thought; Drift was too far away for him to reach, but if he could reach the barrel of the Decepticon’s cannon he could knock it aside, and if he failed, it would just start the loop all over again. The Decepticon was faster than he expected. The cannon fired, sending a blast of pure agony straight through Ratchet’s torso, and the world went dark.


	11. Chapter 11

The ceiling was wrong. The pattern of the tiles was wrong, the color was wrong, the shadows were wrong. Ratchet blinked at it, repeatedly trying to reboot his optics. The primaries responded sluggishly, the secondaries not at all, and that wasn’t right either.

Dull pain washed through his torso, centralized around his spark and not in the comfortingly familiar pattern he’d grown accustomed to throughout the loops. Ratchet gave up trying to get his optics to work properly and felt for where the twinge at his side should have been. The scrape was still there, dermal plating rough under his fingertips.

Error messages kept cropping up on Ratchet’s HUD, blinking red and orange and refusing to be dismissed. In frustration, he tried muting all of them, but his main processor wasn’t working any better than his primary optics. The boot process had apparently stalled out at some indeterminate point, and half the subroutines were either operating at a glacial pace or not running at all.

It wasn’t just the ceiling that was wrong, then. Ratchet pushed himself up into a sitting position, trying to figure out where he was. It took a few moments to piece together the image of the medibay, and that wasn’t where he was supposed to be at all.

The loop wasn’t resetting properly. Clearly he was going to have to nudge it into place, which meant going back to the start. Once he’d gotten it to start over, the fog over his mind would lift and he could go about trying to get back out, except this time he wasn’t going to… to… something. It wasn’t important. He’d remember it later.

Several things – lines, cables, tubes, objects he felt he should recognize but that skittered just off the edge of familiarity – were attached to him, some under his dermal plating.  With a shaking, heavy hand, Ratchet set about tearing them loose. Most of them came easily, but the last required almost more strength than he had left.  Letting the stubborn thing fall away, Ratchet laboriously swung his legs over the side of the recharge slab.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Ambulon reached him just in time to stop him from sliding right onto the floor as gravity wreaked merry havoc on Ratchet’s gyros.

“This isn’t right,” Ratchet told him, or tried to. There was a lot of static in his vocalizer. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“No, you should probably be dead,” Ambulon said, lifting Ratchet back onto the recharge slab with very little apparent effort.

“But it hasn’t reset.” Ambulon didn’t understand. There was a reason he didn’t – it hadn’t been explained to him, not in this loop and not in any of the others. “The loop hasn’t reset,” Ratchet clarified.

“Uh huh,” Ambulon said, and now he was hooking all the lines back in that Ratchet had so carefully taken out. “How are you feeling?” he asked, attaching something near Ratchet’s spark. An alarm Ratchet hadn’t noticed suddenly cut off, and his audials rang in the silence.

“Wrong,” Ratchet said, and a previously failed connection clicked into place. His processor still wasn’t running properly, but he could tell now that the vast majority of his available energy had been diverted to self-repair, and that the levels of said available energy were much lower than they should have been. Compensating for the additional power to his processor, Ratchet’s motor relays cut out. At least he could still speak. “Low power. Repair systems in overdrive.”

“Any pain?” Ambulon appeared to be checking to see if Ratchet had caused any additional damage.

“Little bit.”

Red light all but blinded Ratchet, filling his vision and then fading as abruptly as it had appeared. “Your spark’s still stable,” Ambulon said.

“And you thought it wouldn’t be?” That came out relatively static-free, disturbing question that it was. Extra power being supplied by an external source was finally being directed productively, the stalled boot process slowly resuming.

“Energy weapons fired directly at the spark chamber tend to have a deleterious effect,” Ambulon said drily.

The memory came back; the cannon pointed at Drift, and Ratchet’s attempt to redirect it. “Drift!”

“What?” Ambulon stopped whatever it was he was doing just past Ratchet’s field of vision and stared at him.

“Is he all right?” Ratchet’s motor relays were unresponsive, and he couldn’t see if Drift was in the medibay. That didn’t stop him from trying.

“He’s fine,” Ambulon said, a note of uncertainty in his voice. “He’s not here,” he added.

Ratchet relaxed. “Any other casualties?”

“Not your concern at the moment,” Ambulon said.

Ratchet bristled. Of course it was his concern. The wellbeing of every mech on board the Lost Light was his concern. He opened his mouth to tell Ambulon, only to be interrupted by his main processor throwing up an error message requiring a total reboot.

Ratchet blinked. The ceiling tiles weren’t right. He wasn’t in his hab suite at all; a quick glance around confirmed that he was in the medibay. With something approaching trepidation, Ratchet checked his internal chronometer. It immediately spit a date back at him – days past the morning of the Decepticon invasion. 

“The loop’s been broken,” he said softly, and the pieces fell into place. Brainstorm’s device – Ratchet had no idea what it was, but he was willing to call it reckless, irresponsible, and ill-advised, and then go downhill from there – had been the catalyst for his casually bouncing around in time, as if it weren’t a linear progression that couldn’t be traversed in any way other than living through it.

Of slightly more immediate concern, however, was First Aid standing over him.  Between the visor and the mask, not to mention the completely neutral body language, Ratchet had no idea what to expect out of his protégé.

“I see you’re awake again,” First Aid said.

“Again?” The word jogged an almost completely corrupted memory file. Something about Ambulon.

“You pulled yourself right off of life support,” First Aid said, and he was either amused or angry. “Tried to walk out the door.” Ratchet still couldn’t tell which it was.

“I… don’t know why?” he offered. That wasn’t in any of the readable parts of the file.

“You’re a terrible patient,” First Aid said, and that did sound amused. “Can I trust you not to cause any additional damage now?”

“Maybe if you told me what the initial damage was,” Ratchet said. It came out far more peevishly than he’d intended. Any trace of humor vanished from First Aid’s demeanor as he explained.

The Decepticon cannon had gotten off either a supremely lucky or an incredibly unfortunate shot, depending on point of view; it had cracked Ratchet’s spark chamber and nearly burned through the connection to his t-cog. The rest of the damage was more or less superficial, for all that it had melted a good deal of his insides.

“You’re going to be fine,” First Aid said. Ratchet swatted him, arm trailing a fuel line.

“Obviously,” he said, the word just as much a compliment of First Aid’s skills as an assessment of the relatively minor nature of the damage. “And the other casualties?”

“Not your concern,” First Aid said, which was exactly what Ambulon had said.

Ratchet arched an optic ridge.

“Not yet,” First Aid amended. “Drift’s been asking after you,” he added. “You want me to tell him you’re awake?”

“Yes.” The word slipped out before Ratchet thought about it. “And stop smirking.”

“I’m not smirking.” First Aid was lying, Ratchet was sure of it. He glared at his subordinate, who made himself scarce on the other side of the medibay.

Ratchet set about examining the various lines attached to his systems and removing the ones that had been made redundant, which was to say all of them. First Aid had replaced the missing parts and welded the broken ones, and there was no reason for Ratchet to remain on any type of external support.

“Stop that.” First Aid had migrated back over, no doubt called by the alarm that Ratchet hadn’t silenced quickly enough when he’d pulled the monitor off his spark chamber.

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Cracked spark chamber!” First Aid lunged forward, trying to reattach the lead.

“Competently welded back together,” Ratchet snapped, fending him off. His motor relays weren’t responding as quickly as they should have been, given the huge percentage of energy still directed toward self-repair, but he could still keep the other medic from implementing obviously unnecessary procedures.

“Am I interrupting something?” Drift asked from the doorway, voice rich with poorly suppressed laughter.

“Yes,” First Aid said, just as Ratchet said “No!”

“I could come back later,” Drift said, half-turning.

“Stay,” Ratchet said, and First Aid used the distraction to clip the monitor back into place.

“It’s this or the death clock,” First Aid said, when Ratchet’s hands moved to pull it back off.

“It’s not a death clock,” Ratchet said, cutting off whatever it was that Drift was going to say about a perfectly innocent piece of medical technology, and then the stricken look on Drift’s face made the argument moot. “I am _not_ dying, and I’m not staying here.”

First Aid rounded on Drift. “ _You_ deal with him.” He did a credible imitation of Ratchet stalking off, spoiling it by glancing over his shoulder every few steps.

“So,” Ratchet said, wriggling around until he was at least sitting up instead of lying flat on his back.

“So,” Drift agreed, perching at the foot of the recharge slab. It should probably have looked ridiculous, but he managed to look perfectly at ease.

“So did anybody die?” Ratchet asked when Drift lapsed into silence and just looked at him.

With a rather uncertain glance toward First Aid, Drift shook his head. “Mostly we just expanded the Decepticon population in the brig. The worst of it was you.”

“And Ultra Magnus,” Ratchet added.

“Ah, Magnus,” Drift said, going with the change of subject. “That’s been, uh, fun.”

“Oh?” Ratchet looked at him expectantly, and Drift told him that Rodimus had shown nothing less than his usual tact in handling the situation. With that particular turn of phrase, Ratchet expected to hear next that it had been a total disaster.

“His software’s been completely debugged,” Drift said. “You got the physical components of the, ah, device and he’s back to his usual charming self.”

“He must have been ambushed during the recon mission,” Ratchet murmured, heroically not commenting on Rodimus actually handling the entire situation quite competently, and Drift nodded.

“His memory files aren’t readable, but that’s the most reasonable explanation.” 

“I take it that means I’ve been forgiven.” Ratchet had asked Rodimus to take him on faith, and it had been quite a bit of trust the captain had placed in him.

“More or less.” Drift’s sudden shark-like grin was not encouraging in the slightest.

“More or less?”

“Apparently our fearless leader thinks you should have come to him first.” Drift shrugged. “He says he wants the full explanation of how you knew the device was there, and the explosive above the engines, and the ambush. The one that we didn’t quite manage to avoid, even with the warning.”

“Oh, he’ll get an explanation,” Ratchet muttered, slouching down. He wasn’t really looking forward to that particular conversation, but Rodimus deserved nothing less than the truth.

Drift put a hand on his ankle, the touch oddly soothing. “Ratchet…”

“I’d rather not tell the story more than once,” Ratchet said.

“That’s not it.” Drift shifted ever so slightly closer, thumb making little circles on the inside of Ratchet’s ankle. “I’m, uh, not sure how to say this.”

“Say what?” Ratchet said, more sharply than he’d intended, and Drift’s hand stilled.

“You took a bullet for me,” he said unhappily.

“Technically, it was an energy weapon,” Ratchet said, unable to stop himself. Drift’s grip tightened.

“You know what I mean,” he said, voice laced with ill-defined tension.

“I do,” Ratchet said.

“I’m not going to say it was the worst moment of my life, because we both know that’s not true.” Drift paused, the pressure of his hand becoming almost painful. “But I…” Static crackled through his vocalizer, and he cut it off.

“Drift,” Ratchet started, and Drift lunged forward. Ratchet couldn’t have fended him off if he’d tried; instead, he welcomed him.  Drift clung to him, shivering slightly, every line of his body fiercely protective.

“Don’t – please don’t ever do that again,” he said.

Ratchet pulled Drift closer, pulling him against his aching chassis. “I can’t promise that, any more than you can.”

“Oh, sure,” Drift muttered. “The medic won’t promise to stay off the front lines.”

A bit of a laugh bubbled up at that. “I’ll try not to jump in front of any more really big guns,” Ratchet offered. “If you’ll do the same.”

“Deal.” Drift tucked his face against Ratchet’s neck, wriggling a little to fit better. “Although I’m not sure it’s entirely fair. Since it’s sort of my job description to be on the front lines of any fighting we come across.”

Ratchet paused for a moment, trying to look down at Drift and not really able to see anything other than the back of his head. “Now you’re just trying to be obnoxious,” he said finally.

“Maybe a little,” Drift admitted.

“Yeah, well, cut it out. Doesn’t suit you.”

“Pffft,” Drift said.

“Don’t you pffft at me.” Ratchet was glad to fall into the familiar rhythm of a good-natured back-and-forth, and from the curve of Drift’s lips against Ratchet’s neck, he felt the same.

The rest of the Lost Light could wait a few hours, Ratchet decided; the casualty list, the explanation to Rodimus, the evaluation of First Aid’s performance as acting CMO (for all that Ratchet had a nagging suspicion that he hadn’t actually officially handed control of the medibay over to First Aid during the final loop), the conversation he was going to have to have with Brainstorm about dangerous experiments, all of it.

For what was sure to be a very brief moment of peace, Ratchet was perfectly content to sit still with Drift pressed against him, and then Drift ruined the moment.

“I have to go,” he said, extricating himself with an aggravatingly fluid sense of poise, which First Aid took as a cue to start hovering again, and then Rodimus strode through the doors with a sense of the overly melodramatic followed by an extremely rigid Ultra Magnus, and the entire atmosphere exploded into far too many voices talking at once.

“Right, because this entire ship thrives on chaos,” Ratchet said too quietly for anyone to hear above the ambient noise, and sat back to watch First Aid attempt to chase the captain and second in command out of the medibay. If nothing else, chaos made for an entertaining spectator sport.

In the midst of the increasingly loud confrontation, Drift caught Ratchet’s optics, grinned and shrugged.

“Escape while you can,” Ratchet mouthed. “Save yourself.”

With a suitably dramatic gesture, Drift obeyed. Ratchet watched him until the door slid shut, and then leaned against the wall to enjoy the rest of the show.  

END


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